CyberStorm 060 + Cybervision 64 (CU Amiga August 1995)

Fitting the card is fiddly, but not too bad. It really is necessary to strip the whole of your Amiga down, including removing the expansion card holder (which is not mentioned in the manual) to make sure that the board will stay seated when the further modules are plugged onto it in situ. There’s only two jumpers in the Amiga to change though, and having these in the wrong position doesn’t harm anything but you’ll know they’re wrong as your system will refuse to boot.

Switching the Amiga on for the first time is a nervous moment as the card lets its presence be known by flashing the screen all the colours of the rainbow – a heart stopping moment if you don’t know that it is supposed to do that! The first sign that something is different is the speed in which your machine boots…

The first thing to know about this card is that it’s fast. Lightning may be a more appropriate word, and soon anything and everything was being thrown at it in the way of benchmarking software to try and get a grip on the actual speed.

Phone me now!

AIBB 6.5 refused to work. Not too good a start, but not really surprising as this probes the machine very deeply to try and find what’s inside it. Over to Sysinfo. 71 times faster than an A600? 39 MIPS? 28 million floating point operations per second – an 030 running at 25MHz will return around 2 MIPS and 0.7 MFLOPS. We’re talking speed here.

Another old benchmarking program that opens a window and plots a graph of speed comparisons between the machine and the old 2000 had an interesting problem as it ran out of space and tried to write over the window bar.