Reply to the user nekoniaew - I already knew, that the A501 memory-expansion is not Fastram, because I had already written exactly that myself, in the first entry here. Back then in time, alot people called this memory Fastram though (I did too at the time), which was not correct, as it turned out later. Nevertheless, also the 512kb Slowram, which the A501 can deliver, was used in alot of good Amiga classic-games, back in the 90's, so also this memory can be used in a senseful way, maybe not here in this Galaga port, but in alot of other games. Buying an Indivision ACA board, only for a handful of newer games, may be interesting for some people, but not for me, because all the best Amiga classic-games work perfectly without such a board and only with the normal 7MHz and 512kb+512kb memory.
> because I had written exactly that myself in the first entry here
I did not see it but yup, I get your point.
As for buying extra fast RAM, yes, as long as a game does not need the extra bandwidth given by fast RAM, any additional RAM, even if slow, would be fine but here it looks like the game is heavy on DMA and CPU which means that it would benefit from fast RAM since this allows the CPU to do its job without being hindered by the chipset.
I also do think that there is a way to make Galaga to run smoothly without actual fast RAM on A500 but that would probably require a lot more work on the engine. It's up to JOTD to decide if that is worth it to him.
What do you think, nekoniaow and jotd666, could 1MB Chipram solve this slowdown-problem in Galaga500? One of my four Amiga500 was modded back then in the 90's and has a switcher, with which I can switch between "512kb Chipram + 512kb Slowram" and "1MB Chipram and 0kb Slowram". 1MB Chipram was great in tools like Protracker back then, because it allowed song-modules, to be much larger and there are also a few games, that only works correctly with 1MB Chipram. But mainly, you benefited from it, in a few tools.
I have not tried Galaga500 on exactly this A500 so far, because it's in my old room, in my parents house. Must try it out, how the game runs there, in the next week. Nevertheless, if it runs faster there, this is also not the ultimate solution then, because the vast majority of A500 users, will surely not have modded their computer in this respect, but it's definitely interesting to try it out.
A full 1MB of chip RAM (or more) should not improve the situation because the problem lies with the CPU not getting enough access to memory, so only fast RAM would help here on the hardware side.
An internal fast RAM expansion would probably be the cheapest hardware way to solve the issue.
Software wise, you'd need to find someone capable of optimizing the hardware interface layer of JOTD's conversion, not easy.