4 Jan
2010
4 Jan
'10
5:42 p.m.
On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 11:28 AM, geoffrey oltmans
<oltmansg at bellsouth.net> wrote:
Good point... you would think they would have opted to
make the ISA slots a completely
separate board from the mainboard to save some coin... and then sell that with the
bridgeboard instead of including it with the motherboard. Those extra ISA slots take up a
tremendous amount of real estate.
Yeah, the board is huge. If you look at the Amiga 2000 case, the
motherboard occupies the entire footprint of the case including under
the drives and power supply.
In the amiga 3000 and 4000 (and T models), they did switch to riser boards.
Having the slots there made for an interesting upgrades though.
Someone made a card called the Golden Gate "bridgeboard" (not to be
confused with the Golden Gate 386/486 bridgeboards) that simply
bridged the slots without providing a PC clone. The idea was that
with extra drivers, you could put ISA cards in and access them
directly from the amiga.
I believe the slots were also powered all the time because there were
some 8-bit ISA time base corrector boards that were designed to go in
the amiga, just taking power from the ISA bus. The interacted with
the rest of the system through cabling.
brian