MNT VA2000 Amiga Graphics Card (Zorro II/III)

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Nice that we seem to have A2000-compatible video cards coming out of the woodwork these days!  This one seems a lot "rougher around the edges" than the other two, however.  Looks like it's using a full FPGA board to produce the video signal, so in theory this means this one could be more easily upgraded (sort of like the Vampire cores)?

Now if only we had a decent software solution!  *shakes fist in the general direction of the P96 guys and all the thread-trolling about them in other places already, recently*  :laughing:

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Does this has 4mb ram or more? I know It reserves 4mb from Zorro II adress space.

Just wondering, what are benefits of this card? I prefer original (old) hardware with my miggies, but if there is a good reason to buy I would buy one. Good reason is not that it is new, what is real life speed diffrence to older cards?

All graphics cards require a portion of the Zorro address space.  This isn't a problem on A3000/A4000 machines with their Zorro III bus, but on A2000's (with their 8MB Zorro II limitation) often you had to do various work-arounds.  For example if you had an 8MB memory board and a graphics card that required 2MB, you'd have to jumper your memory board down to 6MB in order for them to play nice together.  Or use segmented mode, or various other work-arounds.  Presumably this card has the equivalent of 4MB of video ram, or for whatever other reason requires 4MB of address space.

In any case, if you (quote) "prefer original (old) hardware", there's really no convincing you why you might need or want this board.  Is it going to help you run old games better?  Of course not.  But for people who like to run newer software, or really push the limits of their systems, more graphics card options is always better.  

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Your right but with a good accell card you can run 128MB on the card and still have 8 meg, maybe a hair more on the bus. An 8 MB Graphics card maybe doable.

That's something I would like to see!  I have 128MB on my accelerator, certainly don't need the extra mem in the ZII address space (except for a handful of older programs that still look for it there).  Would be interesting to see an 8MB graphics card, fully saturate the Zorro II bus, what the heck.  It's not like we really need that space.  But then you're still going to hit the limitations of the slow speed of the bus, and with newer accelerators like the Vampire going to include built-in graphics anyway, it's unlikely we'll ever see a truly "maxed out" Zorro II video card.  

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

where this guy's bureau apparently is

I assume by "bureau" he means "where this guy's company is" or "where he works", or something along those lines.  But over here a bureau is one of these:




:lol:

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

just curious but what about Zorro III speeds/limitations?

Still like 9349057398547x faster than Zorro II, haha.  

*I know that's not an approximate number.  I'm sure some smart-ass will come along and say exactly what the performance difference is, but I can't remember and can't be bothered to google it right now, lol.  :lol:

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

The icing on the cake would be if the video adapter would support AGA and audio to put sound out the HDMI.

Does the video slot carry audio signals from Paula? Afaik it does not, but I've certainly been wrong before.

You'd probably need one of those HDMI cables like kipper2k used to sell:

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

guys hold up the VA2000 & X-Surf 100 are working great BUT with only v1.4 firmware on my system...for whatever reason the last few updates are messing with the x-surf-100 BUT the developer knows about the issue and will hopefully get it sorted out on a new update soon but in the mean time the card works great with v1.4 for me

Hey hey, an actual responsive developer. Guys should buy more of this hardware to support him.