Why would you need a agp slot, there are no drivers for agp cards, besides,pci is still way faster than the zorro3 bottleneck. that bottleneck will always be the problem.
The existing Voodoo 3 and Radeon R200 drivers would work but as you said, the bottleneck is elsewhere and there would be no performance advantage whatsoever.
I seem to recall drivers for sata cards under os4x,but dont recall them for 3/x. I think it was non bootable anyway.
They may be bootable on a soft reboot once OS4's kickstart has loaded but otherwise there is no way for the OS to know that about PCI cards until the pci.library is loaded.
They could license 3.1 ROMs and source from Hyperion like Individual have.
Parts of kickstart could be moved to hard disk but would there actually be enough space in a 1MB ROM for pci.library, a SATA driver and the necessary OS components to actually be able to boot from a PCI card?
The other question is would PCI SATA or IDE card actually be any faster than Elbox's FastATA cards and it still wouldn't offer DMA.
if anything i would like to see pci-e..
Still pointless since compatible PCI cards are still easy to source.
I dont think its so much a lack of competition as its become such a small market no one wants to take the chance since they won't sell enough. its a monsterous investment to develop stuff like this. The grex was the best idea of the bunch since it had a true pci bus,and didn't suffer from the zorro3 bottleneck.
They did actually innovate with the Dragon but I can only assume that they never achieved the CPU performance necessary to make it viable. Without a CPU and RAM being local to the Mediator or it's PCI bus, there isn't really much more worthwhile you can add to the existing design. It will always be limited by the bottle necks of the Amiga it's plugged into.
