The Amiga A1200 is the first sub-A3000 Amiga to leature 32 bit access to the Chip RAM - the memory used by the custom chips. As games in particular make heavy use ol the custom chips lor graphics and sound, the ability to access this memory taster can result in substantial speed increases. At the moment it is impossible to add 32 bit Chip memory to standard Amigas. Such as the A500. It an add-on card ever does become available, it is unlikely the cost involved would be worthwhile. A5000 The A5000 accelerator card tor Solid Stale Leisure has been mentioned more than once in these hallowed pages, the last occasion being in the October 1992 issue. In those days the A5000 had been cut in price to £250, and now it has been cut again, to a bargain hunters dream ot £160. Although this may upset those that spent £250 (sounds like SSL are copying Commodore s mar keting policy) this is good news tor the rest of us as the A5000 is an excellent piece ot kit The A5000 provides a Motorola 68020 processor, although unlike the A1200 it runs asynchronously at 16.6 Mhz. This means that the processor is not locked to one frequency like the A1200 CPU. But makes use of any spare bus »me to run that little bit taster This is why the MIPS rat mg is ever so slightly laster lor the A5000 A large square circuit board, the A5000 tits inio the 68000 socket on the Amiga motherboard The 68000 is placed in a special socket on the A5000, and this provides a special 'tall back' mode 'or awkward software p nrr I I I "to V3.01, tha relative epeed* ol Itie A5000 and h and without fast RAM) war® measured. It maths co-processor (or FPU) comes 1 which makes all the difference with - rensrve maths programs such as fractal generators and ray tracers If desired, a taster coprocessor can be added and a socket is provided to accept the required clocking crystal. It s interesting to note that the processoi and the co processor do not need to run at the same speed - it is entirely possible for a 16MHz 68020 to be connected to a 20MHz FPU. Memory expansion is a doddle with the A5000.