[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 77 of 147 | ANN.lu |
Posted by Dave Haynie on 17-Dec-2001 15:50 GMT | In reply to Comment 53 (the man in the shadows): > where the ZorroIV is part of the components developed in the final days of
> Commodore.
What are you people smoking! There was NEVER a thing called Zorro 4 or Zorro IV at Commmodore. Never! This was intentional.
In 1991, I was working on a thing called the AMI (Amiga Modular Interconnect) Bus, which is as different from Zorro as you can imagine. This was designed to be a high performance chip to chip interconnect, to allow faster, lower cost devices to be connected on a motherboard, or in a small number of module slots. We would have likely had Zorro III slots in the same systems. You can read about the AMI Bus somewhere on http://www.thule.no/haynie, it was part of the Acutiator system spec.
> Something to keep in mind, D.Haynie stated the ZorroIV had very similar
> designs of PCI1.0 when that was first released.
Nope, no Zorro IV. Specs and simulations of the AMI Bus started in September of 1991, not coincidently about the same time that Ali/Sydnes cancelled the Amiga 3000+. The PCI specs were released in early to mid 1992. They did very much the same job, just as well. So I dropped any plans to implement the AMI Bus after that, since clearly, a standard that did the job properly would be a far better thing for all concerned.
> The only problem that I have with PCI is the damn IRQ control method...
PCI doesn't actually state how an interrupt controller has to work, only that you must have an interrupt controller. There's really nothing all that hinky about the PC implementations; sure, they use a fairly arcane set of interrupt controller chips, but then again, so does the Amiga at this point :-). There's no reason anyone not writing the interrupt handler for the OS would even care how the interrupts are physically handled on any PCI or Amiga system.
-Dave |
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