Accelerators

A brief rundown of the accelerators I own

Blizzard 1240T 

I bought this one as a bundle with an Amiga 1200 back in the 2000s. It's not really designed to be installed into a standard A1200 due to need to keep it cool.  I run it with my A1200 raised up on blocks and the trapdoor open to help keep it cool. It does have a small fan on the CPU.

This one is made by 'DCE' who took over Phase 5 after their liquidation.It didn't come with the optional SCSI expansion board.

DKB Cobra accelerator

I inherited this A1200 accelerator from someone at work who told me it didn't work. It sat in my cupboard and I didn't store it particularly carefully thinking it was dead for many years until my interests in the Amiga was revived 10 years or so later. 

It had no RAM installed but comes with the EC030@40MHz (no MMU) and no FPU installed but likely had one before as it has two crystals installed. My one also has the optional SCSI controller.

After getting my 2nd refurbished A1200 I decided to get it out and test it just to see. To my surprise it worked! It was a bit flaky sometimes. After some Googling it seems these cards are problematic and it would pay to clean up the connector (use some lead pencil on it) and tweak out the connector on the card itself to ensure good contact. I did this and now it's working reliably. 

Unlike the Blizzard this accelerator fits within the standard A1200 case nicely. I have it permanently installed in one of my A1200s.

I purchased an FPU and added that in and now I have a fully populated accelerator with 32Mb of RAM.

TerribleFire TF536

A more modern take than the previous two, this is one accelerator all Amiga enthusiast should own. A proper hardware accelerator at an affordable price with a real vintage MC68030RC50C processor and 64MB of RAM.

My only issue with this card is slower than expected HD read/write performance. I'm sure this is something to do with the software setup so I will take a closer look at the software setup at some time to try and resolve that.

Pistorm

I have a couple of these. One for the A500 and the Pistorm32 Lite for the A1200.

These are the most affordable accelerators you can get and very easy to source. I can appreciate their capabilities however they are not as interesting to me as the 'proper' hardware accelerators.