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From: cmcmanis%pepper@Sun.COM (Chuck McManis)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: PC-Incompatible Bridge Card?
Message-ID: <31082@sun.uucp>
Date: Fri, 16-Oct-87 13:39:18 EDT
Article-I.D.: sun.31082
Posted: Fri Oct 16 13:39:18 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 18-Oct-87 00:09:06 EDT
References: <4383@zen.berkeley.edu>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: cmcmanis@sun.UUCP (Chuck McManis)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 27

In article <4383@zen.berkeley.edu> (Ranjit Bhatnagar) writes:
>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 is not a silly thought, this is an excellent thought. And we 
(the BIX crowd) discussed it with the Commodore developers quite
a bit. Everyone seemed to agree that it was a good thing, but no
one wanted to build it or write the code to handle it properly.
Since most PC type cards expect to be run in a PC they make certain
assumptions about cycle times, and byte ordering and such, plus
sometimes the code to run them is actually in ROM on the board itself !
So, why not forget about the bridge card being a PC compatible board
and instead treat is as a simple I/O processor frontend for PC cards.
Then you can tell your friends your Amiga has intelligent Channel I/O. :-)
Seriously though I think that this is the single best use for it (IMHO)
since you don't really 'gain' anything by having it be a PC.


--Chuck McManis
uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis   BIX: cmcmanis  ARPAnet: cmcmanis@sun.com
These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you.