By Jerimy Campbell, Contributing Writer, camp9918@dpnet.net
I recently purchased the Blizzard 1260 Turbo Board manufactured by Phase 5 Digital Products. I ordered the accelerator from Select Solutions for $744.00, which was the best price I could find it for. I also got a 16mb SIMM at the same time. I was originally planning on ordering one of the 040 accelerators for my A1200 because I had read that there were fewer incompatibility problems with them, not to mention the fact that they cost much less. I called a few places and no one had the 040's in stock, so I decided to go all out and get the 060. I'm honestly very happy that no 040's were available because the amount of incompatibilities I've come across are not worth mentioning. The Blizzard 1260 comes with a program called Cyberpatcher that allows programs that are looking for the older style math coprocessor to work perfectly with the 060. Most new programs work perfectly with the 060 and there are many patches available either from Aminet or directly from the software developer for the ones that don't.
One of the drawbacks of having an unaccelerated Amiga connected to a Multiscan monitor is that in the higher resolutions the screen updates slow down quite a bit. What I mean by this is that it takes the Amiga a long time to display the Icons, backdrops, and windows on the screen. Now that I have the 060 installed this is no longer a problem; regardless of the screenmode I choose, the updates are plenty fast. Here is a small list of games and productivity programs that I've found work perfectly with the 060: Capital Punishment, SlamTilt, Breathless (w/patch from Power Computing), Alien Breed 3DII, Final Writer 5.04, Final Calc, TermiteTCP, IBrowse, Dpaint IV AGA, Scenery Animator (w/Cyberpatcher), VistaLite3.00, and countless others. I cannot recommend this accelerator more highly, it seems expensive, but considering that your limitations are practically nonexistent, it's worth it.