Big Book of Amiga Hardware

The original author(s) of this page/entry back in 2004 believed there were 2 versions of the card - one for the A3000 and one for the A4000.  Speculation also exists 'in the wild' that there may be an A3040 / A4040 type labeling difference.  Logically, this does not fit with availaible information.

Documentation on the A4040.DMS support disk, 24-Mar-1994, identifies this product as a the GVP A4000 G-Force040.  It is still possible that overseas distribution used different product labeling for magazine/dealer marketing purposes. 

There is spculation that an A3000-specific version may have a modification to address the lack of an INT-2 line on the A3000 CPU connector.  The ancestor card to this, the A3000-only GVP A3000 G-Force040, has no need of the INT-2 in an A3000 CPU slot.  As such, it is unlikely INT-2 unavailability would affect the card operation (as a CPU+RAM only expansion).  Other accelerators for the A3000/A4000 CPU slot also follow this operation logic - Those with I/O expansion (i.e. with a 53c7xx-based SCSI interface) do not work in the A3000's without the INT-2 line manually added to the CPU connector.

There is speculation that different SIMM32 modules might apply to make things fit better in the A3000.  GVP never made any (physically) different-size SIMM32 modules.  The additional memory card was designed for the internal case environment of the A4000D.  The card, by itself, will therefore fit in both the A3000D/T and the A4000D/T cases.  However, only the A4000D can physically support any expansion options off the card.

The card was soon superceeded by the T-Rex II.  The card is therefore rare. 

The additional memory expansion card is extremely rare.

Detailed documentation seems equally rare with regard to the board's 4MB/16MB GVP SIMM32 configuration.  The board supported HW Kickstart remap on the 2nd and 8th SIMM32 sockets only, but what is available on the support disk omits any SIMM32 size information.  Both 4MB and 16MB SIMM32 modules were readily available at the time, so both are expected to be supported.  It appears that the on-accelerator memory banks were OS-detected, likely starting at 0x0800.0000 (a common design).  Software and docuemtation on the support disk indicates that 6x memory slots on the extension RAM card were software-added later, with a provided GVP AddMem-like tool.  It's address location remains unknown at this time.

The SCSI interface module, although announced, was apparently never released, and was probably never made in production.

The board has no known control register space defined, but there needs to be something to control the HW Kickstart Remap function, and at some point, there would have been provisions for the (planned) SCSI interface. to AutoConfig.

The 68040/40MHz CPU was the fastest of this CPU model/version, and was commonly soldered on, making upgrading to a 68060, incompatible with OS 3.1 at the time, unlikely.  There is no idication in the documentation that a 68060 version was ever built.  The $F0.0000 ROM fix/solution for Amiga OS 3.1 and 68060's, used on the T-Rex II (A4060) / A2060 TekMagic boards, and other OEM solutions, came later.

Additional 2022 Edits & Comments by Robert Miranda (GVP Tech Support)

GVP SIMM32 modules are of single-bank 4MB and 16MB type.  The max memory speculation in the title graph area was revised to reflect this. 

Review of the disk media tools and documentation were used to update various other areas of speculation.  As part of the revised spculations, the following information was was applied:

- This product would have been squarely aimed at the A4000 Video Toster market. 
- GVP would not have directly marketed a complex product like this for the Amiga machines where the entire 'package' would not work in.  A later offering, the T-Rex II (A4060), removed the need for the SIMM32 memory, incorporated additional memory, and provided the high-performace SCSI I/O features in one board. 
- The A3000 had been discontinued before this product came out, which was in early 1994. 

Product naming/marketing: GVP was still using 'G-Force' marketing term for these cards in 1994, but the company would begin liquidating assets within a year or so, selling the hardware/IP to a new ower / business entity, GVP-M.  The available product line would have received some 'freshening' in some areas.  The 'T-Rex I' was the internal name for this card, much as the A1200 products had 'Jaws I/II', and 'Fang' labels, which turned into marketing names in some cases. The card that replaced this, the T-Rex II, would get the A4060 designation.