4 Jan
2010
4 Jan
'10
6:31 p.m.
On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 12:01 PM, Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote:
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.
What do you want for one?
Although I probably can't use it at the moment since I have a 286
bridgeboard. It would still be nice to play with one.
Essentially, there's drivers for IDE disks
(yawn),
10BaseT networking
(popular), serial and parallel (occasionally used in the days of
dialup and local printers).
IDE is a bigger deal now than you might think. I have a buddha board
which is basically an IDE controller in a zorro 2 slot. Works great.
But if you could package one of your bridge boards with a throw-away
generic ide/port combo board, a network board, and a driver disk, (you
should throw in a compact flash to IDE adapter also) I bet you'd get
quite a few takers on the amiga boards. 10baseT on the 2000 is not so
cheap these days either. The ability to read/write to high density
floppy drives from that ide controller would be welcome too.
Could you auto-boot the ide disk?
?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.
That's too bad. Desktop resolution and that horizontal scan rate, I
think, are the amiga's Achilles' heal. Although NTSC/PAL comparability
is what made the amiga so popular with the video houses.
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.
Anyone with a 68060 processor board is likely to have a mediator
anyway, which means PCI slots.
brian