[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 68 of 147 | ANN.lu |
Posted by Graham on 17-Dec-2001 13:12 GMT | Whilst I am sure that making a Zorro III card will be an interesting project, there are too many limitations with the bus and age of the technology to make it worthwhile for the small market. Fine, do it for the fun of it, but don't expect to break even on the costs.
What I would like to see is a general purpose I/O PCI card. PCI is harder to work with, yes, however, by using off the shelf components you can get around these problems.
On the PCI card:
1) A PCI-PCI bridge - the card will have its own PCI bus
2) A 10/100 Ethernet controller (PCI) (e.g., 3COM, Intel, SiS)
3) A USB2 Controller (NEC)
4) A Firewire Controller (Lucent)
5) IDE RAID Controller (Promise / Highpoint)
That will probably fill the card up and use up the backplane for Ethernet, 2x USB, Firewire ports. IDE RAID connectors will be on the card itself.
In a few months, you will be able to buy all-in-one PCI devices with integrated Firewire, USB2 and Ethernet (e.g., VT8231 is a PCI chip with 6xUSB ports, Ethernet, AC97 audio, 2x IDE controllers, etc already - used on the Pegasos, I believe).
This sort of card could prove useful for more than just Amigans as well. You could possibly make money on such a device even... |
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