[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 72 of 147 | ANN.lu |
Posted by Dave Haynie on 17-Dec-2001 15:18 GMT | In reply to Comment 14 (Ian Stedman): >1) The current Zorro 3 bus is too slow, 12-15 mbyte/second. SDRAM can transfer
>400-600 mbyte/second with overheads, from experience.
Hint: the ZIII bus was never intended to be a memory bus. And the A3000 implementation was never intended to be the only implementation.
> 2) DIMMS have a 64 bit bus interface, the Zorro 3 bus is 32 bit, so I would
> need a fast multiplexer and extra control logic for this.
You don't need a multiplexer, don't be silly. This part should be obvious. You don't need any extra control logic, over and above "SDRAM controller".
> 3) The SDRAM controllers I have are designed for one memory type. I need to
> be able to auto detect the DIMM type and configure accordingly. At the
> present time, I do not know how to do this.
The SPD (the somewhat mis-named Serial Presence Detect) ROM on most 64-bit DIMMs lets you detect the kind of memory there. Your controller needs quite a bit of flexibility in assigning row/column addresses -- on SDRAM, these are rarely balanced.
> I am looking at this. I am in the process of learning about it and I hope to
> have a solution soon.
There are a few off-the-shelf USB host controllers around that don't need the PCI bus. You won't get bus mastering, but that's not a big deal, anyway, for UXB 1.x. Philips makes two of these, ScanLogic makes one that doesn't work very well (that was on the early versions of the Metabox "Phoenix" system), a few others exist.
-Dave |
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