4 Jan
2010
4 Jan
'10
6:01 p.m.
On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 12:42 PM, Brian Lanning <brianlanning at gmail.com> wrote:
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.
If you are interested in them, you can get them from me ;-) I
purchased the design from the creator when he graduated from college
and turned them out under the name "GG2 Bus+" (to distance myself from
the confusion from the original name). I still have them in stock,
but demand softened precipitously after C= went under. I did manage
to sell a few bare boards to some enthusiastic hobbyists in Sweden a
couple of years ago - they got all their own parts and copied the GALs
from an existing board (no security bit), but it's
been a long time
since anyone really cared about installing a 10BaseT card in an
Amiga
(there's only one 100BaseT ISA card I know of, and it's weird and rare
and there's no driver for it anyway).
Essentially, there's drivers for IDE disks (yawn), 10BaseT networking
(popular), serial and parallel (occasionally used in the days of
dialup and local printers). There's also support in at least one
DOS-oriented PC emulator (someone used it to talk to an FM tuner card
and an EPROM programmer). The hardware supports VGA interfaces, but
the low bandwidth and a few other things made it a non-starter.
There's also some cacheing issues with Zorro-II space and most/all of
the 68060 cards, so people who were maxing out their Amigas at the end
were essentially not able to use this product. One mod I never did
was to remove VGA/shared ISA memory support and shrink the board back
to a 64K AUTOCONFIG block. That would have fixed the issue with
caching at least, but there wasn't enough demand to fund the effort by
that point.
-ethan