CENTurbo I evolution 3 accelerator


Our German distributor, Thorsten Butschke, installs a French Falcon accelerator and reports his experiences in this British magazine...



[Screenshot]

CENTurbo is a Falcon accelerator which fits inside the standard Falcon case to boost your Falcon bus and CPU speed from 16MHz to 25MHz and the DSP, FPU and VIDEL to 50MHz.


[Screenshot]
These figures, with NVDI installed, compare favourably with Nemesis

An eight page A5 manual details the installation procedure, and CENTEK claim anyone who can hold a soldering iron can install the upgrade which involves soldering nine wires - they estimate a fitting time of 30 minutes. A hardware switch enables the accelerator to be switched between normal mode, offering totally original Falcon configuration, and turbo mode which is also available for VGA, RGB and SM124/5 monitors.

Software

In addition to the installation manual you get a separate software manual and a floppy disk containing the following software:
  • Blitslow: An Auto folder utility to slow the Blitter down to 12.5MHz because it doesn't like being accelerated.
  • Autosort: Auto folder re-order utility to make place Blitslow in the right position in the running order and avoid pixel garbage during booting.
  • CENTview: File viewer which supports over 50 different image formats.
  • CENTscreen: Utility to select between screen resolutions.
  • CENTvidel: Utility to configure new screen resolutions.
  • GEMBench: To benchmark your souped up machine and really impress your (ex) friends!
  • NVRAM: Utility to manage the NVRAM settings.
  • General CPX which can be used to toggle the FPU cache on/off.

CENTscreen


[Screenshot]

The CENTscreen software offers some preset resolutions including:
  • 896x672x16/256 at 66Hz
  • 1024x768x16/256 at 99Hz interlaced
  • 1024x768x16/256 at 53Hz non-interlaced
  • 640x480xTrueColor at 66Hz non-interlaced
  • 768x512xTrueColor at 98Hz interlaced
CENTscreen features an Energy Star compatible screen saver, virtual screen modes and mouse accelerator.
Be warned the virtual screen mode gets confused if you set up virtual screen the same size or smaller than the actual resolution.

CENTvidel


[Screenshot]

Using this utility it's possible to create a new resolution which will be available for selection using CENTscreen. To do this you have to select the horizontal and vertical number of pixels, the horizontal and vertical refresh rates and the master clock.
The garbage in equals garbage out rule applies here so if your screen display goes haywire, press the [Esc] key and try again.

The CENTvidel and CENTscreen programs are both easy to use after a few tries and there are plenty of pre-defined resolutions included on the disk.

In use

I use my Falcon primarily to program games and to produce the German supplement to Atari Computing using Calamus 1.09. Since I have the Centurbo installed the only program which doesn't work as it did before is FastCopy Pro v1.2 which I use to copy the Atari Computing subscriber Reader disks - yes there really are some German subscribers!
Before printing the CPU cache has to be turned off using one of the standard Falcon CPXs, a copy of which is included on the disk.

On the plus side working with Calamus at 1024x768x2 resolution means the entire page can be displayed and most of the text is still legible!
CENTurbo is compatible with Cubase Audio and using the virtual screen software you could work on a music score at 4000x2000 resolution which auto-scrolls as soon as the mouse reach the side of the screen.
To really show off the CENTurbo I wanted a program which really pushes the screen to the limit and settled on the latest version of Running, the Doom clone from STAX - even the Running developers where impressed to see how fast their game ran!

The CENTurbo accelerator is very reliable and activated 95% of the time I use my Falcon. The CENTurbo demonstrates CENTEK have the experience to create reliable hardware addons so we can look forward to the CENTurobo II (featuring a MC68040 CPU) and the Phenix 040/060 Falcon compatible computer.


CENTURBO

[] Manufacturer:
CENTEK
4 av. ST Exupery
60180 Nogent s/Oise
France
Tel: +(0)3 44 74 63 30
Fax: +(0)3 44 74 63 40
Email: Centek@technologist.com
Cost:
690 FF (around £75)

[] Pros:
Fast, easy to install
[] Cons:
Must be turned off to use a few incompatible programs

85%



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