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From: lphillips@lpami.wimsey.bc.ca (Larry Phillips)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: board<>3000 RETRACTION-NEAT NEWSGROUP
Message-ID: <2139@lpami.wimsey.bc.ca>
Date: 17 Oct 90 23:05:58 GMT
Lines: 67
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In <10213.AA10213@caleb>, jdp@caleb.UUCP (Jim Pritchett) writes:
>[]
>
>In article <27567@usc.edu> papa@pollux.usc.edu (Marco Papa) writes:
>
>> The Amiga 1000 *NEVER* supported MORE THAN ONE SOTS.  Al third parties that
>> claimed otherwise were fooling you. Commodore-Amiga was VERY specific about
>> this in ALL thir documentation. Some third parties played games with the
>> SOTS concept and were bit.  Thir fault, not Commodore's.
>
>Well, this is not completely correct.  Back when the A1000 first came
>out, the A1000 was promoted as having the capability to add multiple
>SOTS end to end.  Once third parties actually started producing SOTS
>stuff, many problems were discovered when trying to do this.  (Supposedly,
>the problems were mainly due to the extra noise on the bus caused by
>the Kickstart daughterboard - a last minute kludge to the design.)  Later,
>the official CBM line became as Mr. Papa stated.

Nope... It was promoted as having the ability to place multiple PICs in ONE
expansion chassis _OR_ to place one PIC on the expansion bus. Look at the
earliest expansion docs. External circuitry was always required to properly
arbitrate the autoconfig operation.

>From the net traffic on the subject over the years, it seems that some
>A1000s would perform well with 2 or even 3 well designed SOTS cards.
>However, most would fail to work properly under the same conditions
>with the same cards.  A very few A1000s were reported to fail with only
>ONE SOTS!  This is why CBM went to the single SOTS rule.  However, the
>first time that I heard anyone claim that this was official policy was
>about 1.5 to 2 years later!

Machines that failed with one SOTS were defective in one way or another. No
different from saying that some floppy drives gave excessive R/W errors, or
that some machines had poor video. Broken is broken. In the case of SOTS, the
dcumentation from CBM was VERY clear in what was and was not condoned. As it
happened, some machines would work fine with multiple SOTS, even up to 5 or 6
(in one case I know of). There were ways to imrove the chances of being able to
cheat, like faster PALs or adding the grounding mod.

By the time you got your Amiga, a friend and I had already designed a 2 meg
memory expansion, and had it running. It did NOT have a pass-through, for the
simple reason that a passthrough was clearly not a legal configuration.

>One of the primary reasons that many people believe that CBM had always
>had the single SOTS rule is the fact that a certain hardware developer
>(which sold expansion boxes) spread the "single SOTS" idea far and wide
>over the networks.

He (yes, I know who you are speaking of), and others, spread this bit of
information around (myself included, though I never had any products for sale,
and thus, no personal axe to grind). We did this because it was true, and
because a great many people complained when they relied on the bogus
pronouncements of _some_ hardware developers in this matter. The worst offender
in this regard (and in the area of spreading bogus information about DMA vs.
non-DMA disk controllers) is thankfully no longer spreading their
mis/dis-information, nor are they in the disk controller business any more.

-larry

--
It is not possible to both understand and appreciate Intel CPUs.
    -D.Wolfskill
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|   //   Larry Phillips                                                 |
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