>>13998yeah I know. If I'm up to date, I think the fastest you could go right now with an FASTRammed A600 would be a PCMCIA network card with the roadshow TCP/IP stack but I want a computer thing without TCP/IP in my house. I also don't really like the layers of abstraction it adds. Not that it would be a computational problem, it's more of a philosophical and nostalgic one. Amiga for me personally when I got my first one back in the day was the time before LANs or even computerized things everywhere and it just doesn't "feel right" to me. Just don't want it, don't need it.
If I want fast I have plenty of silicone around that goes a lot faster without much of an effort. I've used faster Amigas with some really fast acceleration cards and somehow it's like putting a Porsche engine into a Lada beyond some point. It just doesn't make a lot of sense except for dick-measuring contests. A very moderate 020 expansion that doubles or triples the system clock so the CPU can get a few extra cycles between the chipset is where I see the Amiga at the very fastest. Everything else is diminishing returns and IMHO, kinda nonsense in this day and age. I don't understand why you'd want to invite the bloatedness and shittiness of the modern IT world into such a simple and elegant system.
Back to topic - Then you also could use the parallel port for file transfer, you could even use the external disk port to implement a faster serial port with some glue logic, most of all though a serial port that doesn't strain the CPU as much. I once had a SPI interface implemented on the disk drive port, it was a while ago. You can generally get a lot of speed out of that port if you put the effort in, the CIAs are not that slow. For a computer from 1987 that is. Kids nowadays would say the parallel port and disk drive port can be used as GPIO.
Then you could also install the various patches and implementations of the serial.device that are less CPU-heavy than the Commodore-supplied one. I like artser most there as it's the one that breaks the least from my tests.
I did none of the above and instead found a 16 bit RS232 card for the PCMCIA port for five bucks. That's a lot cheaper&easier than whipping sth. up. I can max it out pretty much and functionally it's more or less the same than what I was planning. There was even already a driver with source code included on aminet, which is always nice.
I had so much fun with this little setup in the last few days, more than I had with IT in general for a long time, which made me ignore all my other projects for the time being. I did some writing/organizing/journaling (yea gay) and some pixel art stuff. I like to just turn everything electronic off, sit down at the Amiga with a cup of coffee and go at what I want to do. The only sound is the disk clicking the gotek's speaker makes. (yes I can turn that off, I don't wanna) I imported the old narrator.device from 2.05 into 3.1 and have the Amiga occasionally drone some information at me with the robotic voice. That was the future world we dreamed about until it turned into well.. this.
I pulled an old Mitsubishi FDD with black bezel out of my computer piles and I plan to modify it for the use with the Amiga, it should fit very well with the smoked acrylic case. While the Flash-Floppy Gotek is practical, I have a metric ton of old floppy disks. I kinda wanna use them and want the tactility of them back. I even found one of my old disk boxes. Dunno.. seemed like an interesting idea.
Next step after that is higher integration with a fast ARM linux machine via arexx and a gcc environment for 68k. Compared to the Amiga, every ARM is a supercomputer and some of that processing power could be harnessed to expand some functionality or just to speed up some number crunching. I also wanted to look for a good Amiga forth interpreter/compiler.
