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From: daveh@cbmvax.UUCP (Dave Haynie)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: PC-Incompatible Bridge Card?
Message-ID: <2524@cbmvax.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 16-Oct-87 02:36:34 EDT
Article-I.D.: cbmvax.2524
Posted: Fri Oct 16 02:36:34 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 17-Oct-87 18:11:05 EDT
References: <4383@zen.berkeley.edu>
Organization: Commodore Technology, West Chester, PA
Lines: 28

in article <4383@zen.berkeley.edu>, ranjit@cory.Berkeley.EDU (Ranjit Bhatnagar) says:
> A silly thought struck me last night: is it possible to create
> a "Null Bridge Card" for the 2000 which is NOT PC-compatible,
> but rather contains the minimum amount of electronics necessary
> to give the 2000 access to PC-compatible hardware such as
> (drool, drool) hard-cards?  Or is the PC-compatibility a vital
> part of the link?  I, for one, would pay a bunch for a board which
> does nothing except enable the PC slots.  (If I had a 2000, that is.)

This would actually be possible.  You'd need some logic to handle the 8 vs
16 bit busses if you wanted XT compatibility, and you'd need to encode all the
IBM interrupts onto maybe one A2000 interrupt.  And basically do whatever it
is that IBM ATs do to look like PCs for those older cards.  They have a 14Mhz
clock on the backplane, and some other stuff.  The neatest things is that the
entire PC I/O address space could show up as 68000 memory on an autoconfig
slot.  Whether or not you're a fan of the PC (and there are few who like it
less than I), you'll certainly have to admit there's lots of nice hardware
out there for it.

By the way, I know of at least one person working on this card, so maybe it'll
materialize some day.

> 	Ranjit

-- 
Dave Haynie     Commodore-Amiga    Usenet: {ihnp4|caip|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh
   "The B2000 Guy"              PLINK : D-DAVE H             BIX   : hazy
    "Computers are what happen when you give up sleeping" - Iggy the Cat