Amiga 500 Upgraded ECS

[Shift838]

I scored an Amiga 500 a few months back and the case was cracked and kicked around by Ace Ventura.  Now I have never owned a real Amiga, what I found when I received it was the floppy drive did not work and had some other issues (bad chips), some bulging capacitors.  Replaced everything and got it working as a standard Amiga 500. 

 

I decided to upgrade the Amiga to make it more robust.  My first upgrade was the Terrible Fire 536 to increase the CPU speed, Fast RAM up to 64mb and an onboard IDE controller to add a IDE2SD adapter.  Works great.

 

I was a bit disappointed in the actual desktop graphics of the OCS chipset.  I decided to look into upgrading from OCS to ECS, to do that I had to replace the Agnus with a Fat Agnus (8372A) along with a Super Denise 8373R4PD chip to be able to achieve ECS graphics modes.

 

My question is for all the Amiga guys that know ECS, what is the best recommended resolution to use for the desktop for NTSC?

 

 

[Daedalus2097]

What aspect of the desktop graphics disappointed you? ECS gives a couple of new graphics modes, but otherwise is very similar to the OCS chipset, including bandwidth. This means that it won't really give you any improvement in terms of graphics (speed, number of colours), and only helps if you want to use ~31KHz modes or super highres modes, both of which are *very* slow on ECS and limited to 4 colours.

 

As for resolution, I tend to use 640x512 (PAL) interlaced when I'm using a native Workbench screenmode, and increase the overscan settings to mostly fill my display, giving a final resolution of 720x564 or something like that. The NTSC equivalent would be 640x400 (720x480 with overscan). Of course, that will flicker horribly on some displays, so it might not be a realistic option depending on the display you're using.