Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ns-mx!iowasp.physics.uiowa.edu!maverick.ksu.ksu.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!apple!bionet!uwm.edu! rpi!bu.edu!orc!inews!iwarp.intel.com!psueea!parsely!agora!billsey From: billsey@agora.uucp (Bill Seymour) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.hardware Subject: Re: IBM cards in the Amiga Message-ID: <1990Jul25.154631.6281@agora.uucp> Date: 25 Jul 90 15:46:31 GMT References: <1990Jul20.172301.6908@watdragon.waterloo.edu> Reply-To: billsey@.UUCP (Bill Seymour) Distribution: comp Organization: Betazoid Central Lines: 61 In article <1990Jul20.172301.6908@watdragon.waterloo.edu> rbharding@trillium.uwaterloo.ca (Ron Harding) writes: : : My roommate and I have access to free Nestar Arcnet cards for the IBM :PC. We will both be getting Amiga 3000s very soon (my first Amiga, he's :replacing his 1000). We have been considering possible ways to use the :Nestar cards in the Amigas. : : We don't consider the Bridgeboard an acceptable option. It's too :expensive, and who wants an 8086-based MS-DOS machine, anyway? If CBM :made a 286- or 386-based board with at least EGA graphics, things might :be different... : : What we are thinking of is a bus-adapter board which uses the :Bridgeboard slot to connect the IBM slots to the Zorro bus. The primary :function of this board would be to map the IBM bus's 1Meg memory space :into one of the many unused Megs of the Zorro address range. It would :also have to map the IBM's 64K io space into another Zorro range. Which :ranges of the Zorro space are used could be set by switches, or maybe even :Autoconfig. : : We have not resolved some issues yet. Unfortunately, the Amiga Hardware :Reference does not describe either Zorro or the 1000's expansion slot :($%#^#%@%#!!). The issues we are concerned about are: : : [Bunch of good thoughts on designing this...] : : Just imagine the possibilities if this is do-able! There are quadrillions :of cards for the IBM PC in the world. There are only a handful of Zorro :cards. With this card, you could have internal modem cards, fax modems, :extra video cards (VGA or whatever), any network card (Ethernet, Token- :ring, Arcnet, etc), A/Ds and D/As. All sorts of stuff. You'd have to be a :hacker-extraordinaire to get a lot of it working, but then you are reading :this newsgroup, aren't you? : : This is getting a bit long. Has anyone out there considered the :challenges of this? If you've already built such a beast, we'd love to hear :about it. On the other hand, if you know of some reason why it's not :possible, well, who asked ya, anyway? There are a number of small implementations of this type out there. Look at things like Wedge and that new goody from Spirit. Nothing I've seen that's quite as flexible as what you're looking at though. There is quite a bit of interest out there in hooking up ISA cards to the Amiga though, we've sold a lot of our AM200A prototyping card, just because of the ISA connectors on it. If you get this all working, you'll have to release the design in the public domain so we can sell even more! :-) Get the A500/A2000 Technical Reference Manual from CATS. That has the best documentation on the Zorro II bus. It should answer pretty much any question you might have about the Amiga end of the thing. :============================================================================= :Ron Harding | Nuke'Em: Get them before they get you! :rbharding@trillium.uwaterloo.edu | Another quality home game from Butler Bros :============================================================================= -Bill Seymour ...tektronix!reed!percival!agora!billsey ============================================================================= Bejed, Inc. NES, Inc. Northwest Amiga Group At Home Sometimes (503) 281-8153 (503) 246-9311 (503) 656-7393 BBS (503) 640-0842