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From: jms@tardis.Tymnet.COM (Joe Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.hardware
Subject: Re: IBM cards in the Amiga
Summary: Don't forget the ROM code built into the IBM cards.
Message-ID: <1176@tardis.Tymnet.COM>
Date: 11 Aug 90 01:51:08 GMT
References: <1990Jul20.172301.6908@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Reply-To: jms@tardis.Tymnet.COM (Joe Smith)
Organization: BT Tymnet, San Jose, CA
Lines: 25

In article <1990Jul20.172301.6908@watdragon.waterloo.edu> rbharding@trillium.uwaterloo.ca (Ron Harding) writes:
>    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.  

  [Description of many features of the board deleted.]

Don't forget about the software required to make those IBM boards run.
Many boards designed to plug into a PC have their own ROM's, which are
designed to be executed by the 8088 CPU.  This means that it takes more
than simply installing a board into a PC/AT slot with a "dumb-bridgeboard".
Some code in the 68000 needs to be executed to initialize the board.

I expect this would require either having a custom INIT file for every
IBM-PC board that can be plugged in to this system, or a "Soft PC" type
program to emulate the 8088.

The hardware is doable, just don't forget the software complications.
-- 
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