Re: Is there a need for Ethernet cards for the Amiga

Richard Wheeldon wrote:
Jukka Aho wrote:
An ISA<->Zorro bridgecard that could breathe life into the ISA slots of
the bigger Amigas and handle DMA / memory mapping would be even better,
though. People have their junk boxes full of old ISA network cards, VGA
cards, sound cards, etc., and driver code is readily available on the
Linux / *BSD side.

There were a couple of these developed a long time ago. One by C=, one
by Golden Gate, iirc (in addition to the emulators). Does anyone know if
the schematics are available. If so, re-development and/or manufacture
should not be difficult,

I am the maker of the GG2 Bus+, formerly known as the "Golden Gate II"
bridge card. It is still available new, with warranty, but there is
such little interest in it, there are few sales. Few sales leads to
zero promotion.

Manufacture is not an issue... at the rate they've been selling at over
the past five years, I have several years stock on hand.

The GG2 Bus+ has SANA2 drivers and MNI drivers for common ISA NICs, and
programmed I/O drivers for serial and printer cards. DMA is not
possible (and never has been with the available products) because ISA
motherboards have the DMA engine on the motherboard, and in the
68000-world, DMA engines were commonly put on the peripherals. That
rules out sound cards and some network adapters (most NICs, though,
used I/O registers or shared memory). VGA cards are not practical
because the ISA bus is low-bandwidth. Try running Windows on a PC
without embedded video or PCI or even VESA LocalBus. The Intel world
abandoned that approach more than 10 years ago.

Another limitation is that there was only ever one 100BaseT ISA card
ever put out that I am aware of (by 3Com), and it essentially has an
internal PCI bus to talk to its NIC chip (I'd post the model number,
but I can't seem to find any references at the moment). Every other
ISA NIC out there is 10BaseT or 10Base2.

The other issue with an ISA-based NIC in an Amiga is that you have to
have two free slots in the machine, one for the bridge card, one for
the NIC. For folks who own A3000s and A4000s, there aren't that many
slots to begin with, now go fill half of them with a network adapter.
One of the things that killed my sales was that people started loading
their Amigas with Zorro RAM and high-end video cards, etc., leaving too
little room for a GG2 Bus+ and NE2000 NIC.

So between available space and low network speed, I can't say that the
GG2 Bus+ is the right solution for everbody. OTOH, if you have a
lightly loaded A3000 and don't intend to pound the network to death, a
GG2 Bus+ might be just the trick.

-ethan

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