ACA500 short manual CF card interface and accelerator for the Amiga 500 or 500+ Dear customer, thank you for purchasing a product from Individual Computers. We're sure that your new accelerator will satisfy all your needs. The ACA500 is easy to install and simply plugs into the side expansion slot of your Amiga and can be used right away. Package contents, unpacking In addition to this manual, you will find the accelerator in a plastic bag in the box and an instructional sticker on the inside of the box. The card comes with jumpers set for normal operation. The ACA500 is delicate equipment, please handle it with extreme caution. If something is not clear after reading this manual, please get help from a technician. If you have further questions, don't hesitate to ask your reseller! Preparing the computer Remove any expansion that you may have installed on the side-connector (=Zorro connector) of your A500. Also, any accelerator that is installed inside of your A500 must be removed. If you've just taken an Amiga 500 out of storage to be used for the first time with the ACA500, you may want to check that the Amiga is in good condition and works properly before installing the ACA500. Refer to on-line Amiga resources for common problems and fixes such as battery leaks and re-seating the custom chips. Installation The card is for the Zorro slot on the left side of your Amiga. Please turn your Amiga off, then refer to the picture on the inside of the box showing how to insert it. Note that the part of the card facing away from you is very thin! You must make sure it's supported with your finger as you push the whole card in firmly, but without excessive force. Also note that the ACA500 has standoffs under it to make it level with the height of your Amiga expansion connector. It must be level, so check that your Amiga's rubber feet are intact, and that there's nothing on the desk under the card or the Amiga. This ensures proper contact between the card and your Amiga. If you need to remove the card, turn your Amiga off, grab the card's left edge, and pull it leftward and away from you, so that the thin, rear part of the card is pulled out last. Adding an A1200 accelerator The ACA500 supports upgrading your Amiga further with even faster Amiga 1200 accelerators. With the power off, insert the accelerator board to match the gap in the keyed connector. Push firmly but gently, do not use excessive force. Compatibility is only guaranteed with Individual Computers Amiga 1200 accelerators. Other 68020/68030 accelerators may or may not work. We will not answer any support questions if you're trying to operate an accelerator that's not been made by Individual Computers. If the A1200 accelerator has a Realtime-clock, it will not be used by the A500. Instead, only the RTC that is located on the trapdoor memory expansion or the mainboard of an A500+ will be used. Adding a Delfina, Silver Surfer, or Subway interface With the power off, please follow the instructions in the manual for your interface, and heed the markings on the ACA500 board for proper orientation of the red marker on the cable. Adding a network/USB module This connector is provided for a future Individual Computers interface. Please monitor our news and our web shop for it's availability. Jumpers There's a 4-pin connector on the underside of the ACA500. By shorting the two pins nearest the CF cards (with the provided jumper or a switch), you can disable the ACA500 – except for the ACA500 CPU, which will still be used at 14Mhz. This jumper is marked J2 on the other side. The disable-Jumper should only be changed when the computer is switched off. If it's state is changed in operation, your computer may crash. The two pins furthest from the CF cards (marked De-brick on the other side) allows you to restore the firmware. If you short these pins with the provided jumper, the card will only enable the resources necessary to restore the firmware from a previously made Recovery Disk (see below). In other words, should the card stop working completely due to a flash failure, you can restore normal function with a backed up version of the firmware in this way. Memory The ACA500 comes with 2MBytes of fast memory auto-configured. This memory is normally located at $c0.0000, which will increase compatibility with older software. It will also automatically configure any trapdoor memory in your Amiga. There are several settings in the Expert Menu to control this memory configuration. Firmware and menus When the card is inserted and you power the system on for the first time, the ACA500 Configuration Menu will appear. Press F9 to cycle through the available languages. This is a quick-start menu that allows you to boot your machine in several modes. F1 is the normal mode for general usage with a Workbench installation on a CF card, and F5 can be used to play games and demos with high compatibility on an A500 with trapdoor memory. It's recommended that the first time you use this menu, you insert a blank disk and press R to create a Recovery Disk! Follow the on-screen instructions, then store the disk in a safe place. This is your warranty against having to send the card back due to so-called “bricking”. Bricking is an exceptionally rare circumstance (for example, power outage while writing to the Flash ROM), but you can rest assured that no matter what happens, you can restore the firmware at any time if you have your recovery disk. The Expert Menu allows you save a customized default or primary configuration, as well as a secondary configuration. These can be explicitly booted with option F6 and F7, respectively. F10 opens the Expert Menu, which offers many settings and functions described on the Wiki: http://wiki.icomp.de/ACA500_first_steps Please refer to this on-line document for detailed information about the menus. Booting from a CF card You prepare a CF card as you would a harddisk for the Amiga: you may insert the CF card in the slot marked 'Boot Card', put the Workbench installation disk in the floppy drive, power on your Amiga, and use HDToolbox from the “install” disk of your OS disk set to format the card and install Workbench on it. With the ACA500, you have the option to use Kickstart V3.1, V1.3, and the ROM that's physically installed in your Amiga. Whatever you choose, make sure that the Workbench disks you use match the Kickstart version you would like to use with the CF cards! A common recommendation for very high functionality and compatibility is to use Kickstart and Workbench V3.1. This also allows you to run WHDLoad games, a great feature supported by the ACA500! We recommend the use of WHDload V17.2 or higher, because starting from this version, the ACA500's feature of making the quit-key work anytime is supported by WHDload. We also recommend to register your copy of this great piece of software. You can also boot from a PC-formatted card, in which case the card must be inserted in the slot marked 'Aux'. This slot must first be enabled in the Expert Menu (note: this will consume some memory). Support for FAT type file systems is built into the ACA500 – so there is no need to install any drivers. You may also prepare your card on a Windows, Linux, or Mac PC, using an Amiga emulator and a CF card reader. Whatever file system you use, the CF cards can be alternately inserted into the PC and the Amiga to transfer files. A two-card setup is also useful: An Amiga-formatted, “normal system disk” CF card is used in the Boot Card slot, and the Aux slot is used with a PC-formatted CF card when you want to transfer files easily and without having to use an Amiga emulator. We recommend to power off your Amiga before inserting or removing a CF card. Hot-swapping is not fully supported (see further down). CF card compatibility The ACA500 is a budget card. That means: It may not always do exactly what you expect it to, especially when it comes to compatibility with different brands of CF cards. Every ACA500 has been fully tested with two CF cards at the same time, so you can be sure that your CF card slots are physically and electrically OK. However, you may find that some CF cards don't work at all (for example they keep the computer from booting), or a combination of two CF cards doesn't work, although each single CF card of that combination works if inserted on their own. This is a compromise that we had to make in order to reach the extremely low cost of the ACA500. If you encounter a CF card that doesn't work, you will most likely find another brand that will work. There is no single brand that we can recommend, and no special size that we can recommend. We've found that expensive brand-cards work fine for one size, and the same expensive brand doesn't work for another size, and we've found the same for low-cost generic CF cards. Please understand that we cannot answer support questions about CF card compatibility.