[Forum] Any interest in Zorro cards? | ANN.lu |
Posted on 16-Dec-2001 01:32 GMT by Ian Stedman | 147 comments View flat View list |
I am currently toying with the idea of designing a Zorro card for the Amiga. What would the interest be in a card with the following:
10/100 mbit Ethernet, 2 X High speed serial ports, 1 X ECP/EPP parallel port & IrDa?
There is some preliminary information on my website
I am also looking at the possibility of adding a Zorro to ISA bridge and making the card work in Zorro 2 and Zorro 3 Amigas.
Are there any other features you would like?
If you are interested, please email me. If there is enough interest I will look at making some prototypes and if feasible, a short production run.
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Any interest in Zorro cards? : Comment 59 of 147 | ANN.lu |
Posted by Joe "Floid" Kanowitz on 17-Dec-2001 02:49 GMT | In reply to Comment 47 (priest): >Anbother grazy idea...
>Some people might want to use their nostalgic Z3/Z2 cards even though their
>"amiga-like" OS runs on pegasos (or on some else future motherboard).
>Would it be possible to make SCSI-Zorro adapter/bridge?
>You could then have the zorro busboard on another tower box that is connected to
>next gen box via SCSI bus.
Hm. Phrasing it this way overshadows a better use for the SCSI adapter present in/on so many Amiga systems- a software hack could allow access to the custom chips over SCSI, provided the classic system is powered up. It might not be wholly useful- if OS4.0 requires the 680x0/chipset just to boot, the custom A1200 interface might be a better gambit- but a few years down the line, it might be a more-affordable solution for 100% compatibility. PCI host adapters for narrow SCSI are dirt cheap now...
I'm thinking of an asynchronous protocol; you blast whatever needs to be run by the custom chips (or sent to the Zorro bus) down the pipe, and the server/driver on the classic box does the appropriate magic, pulls any necessary 'results'/state information out of memory, and blasts that back to the next-gen box. In effect, making the classic box a really 'smart' SCSI peripheral.
Anyone have thoughts on the feasibility, ignoring the utility? I heard 12MB/s quoted for the AmigaOne's direct connection to the 1200's bus; could the 5-10MB/s of your average Amiga SCSI adapter be close enough (with compression)?
How hard would it be to get an acceptable "realtime" response with this sort of setup? The main reasons to have this sort of Classic-access would be to play old games, and to access old Toastery hardware on the Zorro bus, and the former, at least, requires a fairly rapid/well-synchronized turnaround... |
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