My new toys: Apollo and Osborne 1 - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

31 Oct 1999

red bear said:

...
   (tony said)

 I know that some cards will work in both the Apollo and normal PCs.. 
Tony, you've hit the nail on the head. The Apollo ISA bus is a real ISA
bus. 
Oh frabjous day! :-)

...
 However, most ISA cards will not work in the machine
for one of a number
of reasons: 
*snip* ROM incompatibility, *snip* OS support, 
...

Theoretically it would be possible to make any arbitrary ISA card work in
an Apollo if one were to write his own device drivers and software to use
that driver. This driver would have to use no calls at all to the BIOS 
Ingo Cyliax built a 68030 workstation, and he wrote the
drivers for (a specific) VGA and IDE.

Also, Linux has drivers for PC cards, and doesn't use the ROMS.

That's why I asked if it would be sacrilige for me to rip out
(and keep safely, of course) the drives and display cards, etc.

I've since learned that the BIOS contains a monitor, so no
hassles there. Of course, the first thing I did (before
powering up the machine) was to copy the EPROMS (27256 for
3000, 27512 for 3500). I'll put it up for ftp sometime.
(My ftp philosophy is, if the owner complains, I'll take it
down immediately)

...
 The /ASE has floppy, ESDI, and SCSI interfaces.
Don't expect to be able to
boot the Apollo from a SCSI disk, or even to use one at all unless you are 
The FAQ sez that the SCSI interface doesn't support disks at
all. But I hope to boot from the tape... I mean, I don't
have any floppies, 'smatter fact, the "server" (3500) has the
tape and the "workstation" has the floppy.

W