Hi everyone,

Today I’ve got some news concerning a hardware upgrade for the Amiga 1200. It turns out that a new accelerator card will be available for purchase shortly. Vesalia, which is a popular Amiga shop in Germany, estimates that it will arrive on the 1st of March 2012.

This new turbo card has been developed by Jens Schönfeld of Individual Computers in Germany. He’s famous for creating quality hardware such as the Indivision scan-doubler/flickerfixer series, the 68030 accelerator for the Amiga 600 and the recently released Chameleon.

I must say that the specifications of the new Amiga 1200 accelerator (the name is ACA-1231/42) looks juicy.. please have a look below, and I’m sure you’ll know what I mean.. 😉

I sincerely wish I had the cash for something like this!

ACA-1231/42

Amiga 1200 Accelerator Card w/ 68030 CPU incl. MMU

The new ACA-1231/42 offers everything a retro gamer wants:

Speed:
Although the ACA-1231/42 features less MHz than the Blizzard 1230-IV card (42 MHz* vs. 50 MHz), it actually achieves more MIPS (Million Instructions per Second). The reason for this efficiency is the high clock speed of the on-board memory (25 x 3.333 MHz = 83.325 MHz, 2-1-1-1 Burst).

Memory Aplenty:
The ACA-1231/42 comes with 64 MB RAM, 1 MB of which are reserved to map the Kickstart into the fast memory. With Kickstart 3.1** there are 63 MB FastMem available to applications when you switch the A1200 on (1 MB is always located at address 0x00C00000 to gain compatibility with old or badly programmed software; 62 MB are available en bloque).

On Time:
The ACA-1231/42, unlike its predecessor ACA-1230, always comes with an RTC (Real Time Clock) chip installed. You only have to add a battery.

Hardware Compatibility:
The ACA-1231/42 is more tolerant towards different revisions of the A1200 board than the ACA-1230 was. Immunity against fluctuations of old power supplies has been improved while the power consumption has been reduced.

Software Compatibility:
The ACA-1231/42 sports a fully featured 68030 processor, which also includes a functional MMU (Memory Management Unit). The MMU can not only be used to map a Kickstart ROM image to FastMem, it’s also crucial for WHDLoad. The ACA-1231/42 is 100% compatible with WHDLoad! The MapROM function supports Kickstarts of 1 MB size.

* The exact clock speed is 41.6625 (25 x 3.333/2) MHz.
** Kickstart 3.0 users must add the memory with the ACATune software.

I found the information above at the website of Vesalia.

Are any of you going to purchase this new accelerator? If yes (or no), please leave a comment below. Would love to hear what you think. 🙂

If you’ve got an Amiga 1200 without a decent turbo-card, then I’d recommend taking a look at this one. Don’t think you’ll get a better 68030 card for your Amiga 1200 than the ACA-1231.