WTB: Amiga 2000 486 Bridgeboard

[save2600]

586?

Pentium - whatever it was called  :laughing:

[Iggy]

Pentium - whatever it was called  :laughing:

A Pentium would be a 686. 586 processors were intermediate processors made by Cyrix, AMD, and other (often they fit in 486 sockets).

[save2600]

A Pentium would be a 686.

Ummm, no.  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_processor

Besides, penta = 5.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penta-

[desantii]

Save2600, you beat me to it....
 
 
Actually the Pentium in theory is the 585, I believe intel did not have the trademark on that so that is why they called in pentium (Penta = 5). The 686 (sixth generation) was the Pentium Pro and its derivatives (Pentium II and Pentium III). At least this is what I rememeber of the top of my head
 
II

A Pentium would be a 686. 586 processors were intermediate processors made by Cyrix, AMD, and other (often they fit in 486 sockets).

[Jiffy]

A Pentium would be a 686. 586 processors were intermediate processors made by Cyrix, AMD, and other (often they fit in 486 sockets).

You mean the Am5x86 and the Cx5x86, all aimed at 486 motherboards.

Nexgen also had the Nx586, but this had its own socket and was more or less comparable to a Pentium I cpu.

The 586 is indeed the Pentium I (with or without MMX). Pentium Pro is, as mentioned in another post, a 686.

[spirantho]

I knew they (386/486) were rare but didn't know they were THAT rare!
Actually I think I've ever seen only one 286 on ebay... mostly 8088 cards.

I have two 486-ish bridgeboards - they're not that rare really. Well, actually, I have three, but one doesn't work, and that is rare, which is really annoying (it's an A2386SX modified to have a 486SLC33 onboard instead of a 80386SX).

If you're going to use a bridgeboard in an A2000, you may need to look at soldering the 16-bit parts of the ISA slots in. It's easy, but time-consuming (I did it on one of mine). If you don't, you'll be limited to an 8-bit soundcard like a Soundblaster II, and an 8-bit anything-else card (ethernet, IDE etc.).

I have an A2386SX which is upgraded with a 486SLC2-50 (8MB RAM onboard), Trident 256K SVGA card, Soundblaster AWE 64 and a no-name IDE/Floppy card, with a small hard disk attached. That's my Amiga in the living room, it's in a standard A2000 KS1.3 with a GVP SCSI card.

In my other room, I have another A2000, this time with OS3.9, an Apollo 2030@50MHz, 32MB RAM, Picasso II, Ariadne card, Catweasel MkII... and also a GoldenGate 486SLC which is powered by a Cyrix 80486SLC @ 25MHz. This has 8MB onboard at the moment. Graphics card is a 1MB Thunderbolt ISA (Cirrus Logic CL5422 I think), Soundblaster II (8-bit), 3-Com 3c509 (8-bit).

The Goldengate is the better integrated of the two, it uses Amiga floppy drives and Amiga partitions much better. In fact mine uses a 4GB SSD off the Catweasel (which has a Buddha built in). It's also better integrated with serial ports, parallel ports, the mouse, etc., and has a Monitor Master automatic switcher.

The reason I've posted all that stuff, isn't to gloat. (well maybe a little ). But if it's of any help I can tell you how certain pieces of software runs on them. The thing to remember is that the 486SLC chips are not true 486-class chips, they're turbo-386s. They have a 16-bit databus, not 32-bit. Also remember the graphics cards are running on an 8MHz (or 10MHz if you want on the GG) ISA bus. Not fast.

As for how rare true 486/586 bridgeboards are - they don't exist. The closest was an SBC released (possibly) by Blittersoft, I think, but they were just SBCs. Much less cool.

[Xanxi]

I have two 486-ish bridgeboards - they're not that rare really. Well, actually, I have three, but one doesn't work, and that is rare, which is really annoying (it's an A2386SX modified to have a 486SLC33 onboard instead of a 80386SX).

If you're going to use a bridgeboard in an A2000, you may need to look at soldering the 16-bit parts of the ISA slots in. It's easy, but time-consuming (I did it on one of mine). If you don't, you'll be limited to an 8-bit soundcard like a Soundblaster II, and an 8-bit anything-else card (ethernet, IDE etc.).

I have an A2386SX which is upgraded with a 486SLC2-50 (8MB RAM onboard), Trident 256K SVGA card, Soundblaster AWE 64 and a no-name IDE/Floppy card, with a small hard disk attached. That's my Amiga in the living room, it's in a standard A2000 KS1.3 with a GVP SCSI card.

In my other room, I have another A2000, this time with OS3.9, an Apollo 2030@50MHz, 32MB RAM, Picasso II, Ariadne card, Catweasel MkII... and also a GoldenGate 486SLC which is powered by a Cyrix 80486SLC @ 25MHz. This has 8MB onboard at the moment. Graphics card is a 1MB Thunderbolt ISA (Cirrus Logic CL5422 I think), Soundblaster II (8-bit), 3-Com 3c509 (8-bit).

The Goldengate is the better integrated of the two, it uses Amiga floppy drives and Amiga partitions much better. In fact mine uses a 4GB SSD off the Catweasel (which has a Buddha built in). It's also better integrated with serial ports, parallel ports, the mouse, etc., and has a Monitor Master automatic switcher.

The reason I've posted all that stuff, isn't to gloat. (well maybe a little ). But if it's of any help I can tell you how certain pieces of software runs on them. The thing to remember is that the 486SLC chips are not true 486-class chips, they're turbo-386s. They have a 16-bit databus, not 32-bit. Also remember the graphics cards are running on an 8MHz (or 10MHz if you want on the GG) ISA bus. Not fast.

As for how rare true 486/586 bridgeboards are - they don't exist. The closest was an SBC released (possibly) by Blittersoft, I think, but they were just SBCs. Much less cool.

That's really an interesting post!

I am fond of PC-Task 4.4, which i now use on ly desktop 1200 with 1260@50 MHz. The emulation is quite good, with games like Conquest of the Longbow, Dune, Prince of Persia, Monkey Island, Wolfenstein, running perfect. Of course i am limited to BC bipper as there is no soundblaster emulation. Alone in the Dark though is terrificly slow and unplayable.

I also own all the Commodore bridgeboards, and will be using the 386sx whenever i revamp my A2000.

I would be very interested in seeing some benchmarks from your different setups. Maybe you could download the DOS tool called MIPS and give us a screenshot of the result, to compare with PCTask, so everyone knows what to expect. I will post screenshot of MIPS on my setup this evening. Please tell us also what you get with the games listed above, especially Alone in the Dark.

About the 386sx, i think there are enough 16 bits ISA slots in the A2000 to get a 16 bits VGA and a SB16. Running emulation from a hardfile is not bad with SFS, instead of a dedicated hard-drive.

[LoadWB]

Aside from the Amiga/Emu experience -- I had a 386 bridgeboard a long time ago, and it was not so difficult to set up, but I sold it so I could get a 486 which never arrived -- have you tried DOSBox on a PC to run your games in?  I do not use PC games from that era, but several of my friends who do swear by it.

[Crom00]

I had the 386 bridgeboard, 486 slc board, and all of this housed in an A3000T. I can tell you getting a throw away Pentium 4 machine or a 5 year old off lease pc is 100 times better than trying to configure this old stuff.

Just install UAE, Amiga KIT and pop in your amiga drive, run dos box, and you're set.

ALthough cool all The Commodore bridgeboards I had never worked 100% the Golden Gate was great but does anyone remember to run win 3.1 on a good day you needed everything as fast as possible... and even then it was slow. I did have one cool GFX card for the pc called the winstorm from sigma designs, Featured a vesa gfx card, sound card, joystick and scsi cdrom controller buitin to one card.

Also if you can find it the old CROSSINGS bridgeboard newsletter was pretty god, spoke to the author of that she was very helpfull with all this stuff.

OR just walk into walmart, get the cheapest PC they have and install everything on that and save yourself countless hours of wasted life configuring old stuff. Your time would be better spent selling it on ebay to folks who will pay $$$ for this arhaic old tech.

To each his own, I used to have this fascination and I eventually outgrew it.

[save2600]

As for how rare true 486/586 bridgeboards are - they don't exist.

I'm fairly certain Allocvec here had a German made Pentium BB for the Amiga a little while back. I know because I was hoping to snag it up for reasonable so I could play the only Win95 I give a crap about: Jeff Wayne's version of The War of the Worlds - a fun RTS game, especially to big WotW fans. I guess there's a PSX version of it too, but I've never seen it.

[spirantho]

I never outgrew it.

Of course you can buy a cheap PC, but where's the fun in that? There are loads of reasons for using a real PC over an expensive, slow bridgeboard.... but nothing is quite as funky as having your Amiga switch over to a DOS machine for a bit and then back again whenever you want.

Incidentally, there's two slots in the A2000 motherboard which are 16-bit, that's true... but the bridgeboard uses one of them! Hence only one left, which I very strongly recommend you use for as fast an SVGA card as you can get.

I did actually try Alone in the Dark on my bridgeboards. The vanilla 386SX ran it rather slowly, the GG ran it well and the 386SX after upgrading to 50MHz 486SLC ran it very well, a definite improvement.

It's true, for most people, using a bridgeboard is daft... but for people like myself it's still fun to tinker with, so I do. Which, after all, is the reason many of us still use Amigas at all.

[Xanxi]

Well, guys, most of you seem to have forgotten that we are here because we ENJOY configuring old stuff.

[Xanxi]

I never outgrew it.

Of course you can buy a cheap PC, but where's the fun in that? There are loads of reasons for using a real PC over an expensive, slow bridgeboard.... but nothing is quite as funky as having your Amiga switch over to a DOS machine for a bit and then back again whenever you want.

Incidentally, there's two slots in the A2000 motherboard which are 16-bit, that's true... but the bridgeboard uses one of them! Hence only one left, which I very strongly recommend you use for as fast an SVGA card as you can get.

I did actually try Alone in the Dark on my bridgeboards. The vanilla 386SX ran it rather slowly, the GG ran it well and the 386SX after upgrading to 50MHz 486SLC ran it very well, a definite improvement.

It's true, for most people, using a bridgeboard is daft... but for people like myself it's still fun to tinker with, so I do. Which, after all, is the reason many of us still use Amigas at all.

Can you tell what is needed to upgrade the 386sx? Some kind of old overdrive CPU maybe?

[hardlink]

spirantho> As for how rare true 486/586 bridgeboards are - they don't exist.
Xanxi> I also own all the Commodore bridgeboards, and will be using the 386sx whenever i revamp my A2000. I would be very interested in seeing some benchmarks from your different setups.
Crom00> Also if you can find it the old CROSSINGS bridgeboard newsletter was pretty god, ... To each his own, I used to have this fascination and I eventually outgrew it.

What a great discussion! No, I haven't outgrown the fascination - almost anything, no, anything you really NEED to do with a computer (except bloated network apps) can be done on the Amiga or with FreeDos; no, you really don't need an iPhone, but you may want one. I believe I have a complete Crossings collection stored away, I never thought about that as a possibility for digitization before. 486/586 "Bridgeboards' (tm@CBM)? Nope, ask Scott Drysdale (http://www.linkedin.com/in/rscottdrysdale).

A couple of 'clip ons' for the 386SX exist, though. And yes, I also own multiple copies of all the Commodore bridgeboards and have used them. The ones previous to the 386SX and the latest/last Janus were difficult to set up. I should probably test out all my  386 'clip on' upgrades and sell a spare 386 BB, but not yet I even have a, yes, i286 to i486 upgrade to try on a 'Bridgeboard 2000'! (I think 'Bridgeboard 2000' is silkscreened on the circuit board of i286 BB's)

Sure, I could buy a few Steve Jobs iWhatevers and ditch all my other electronix, so please no 'pick up an old IBM clone along the side of the road and use it' comments - I already do that. And I have probably some of the fastest SingleBoardComputers with an ISA bus - dual Pentium IV. Big deal. I like running FreeDOS stuff on Amiga hardware; some people like riding old noisy Harleys - you *NEVER* see someone pulling up beside them at a light and telling them, if they want to ride, they should junk it and get a new Suzuki (at least not in the U.S.; anywhere else, and I'd like to watch .

There seems to be new hardware coming out, I am all for somebody making a new generation of bridgeboards!

[amigadave]

I had the 386 bridgeboard, 486 slc board, and all of this housed in an A3000T............ALthough cool all The Commodore bridgeboards I had never worked 100% the Golden Gate was great but .......... I did have one cool GFX card for the pc called the winstorm from sigma designs, Featured a vesa gfx card, sound card, joystick and scsi cdrom controller buitin to one card.

To each his own, I used to have this fascination and I eventually outgrew it.

Some of the best times I had using my Amigas were on my A2000 w/030@40MHz Vector accelerator, GoldenGate 386sx Bridgeboard & Emplant running MacOS7.5.5 to run Netscape Navigator.  My brothers and sisters were puzzled and amazed that I was running all three OSes at the same time from one computer, though I did not boot into Windows3.11 too often (it was horrible).  I still have the WinStorm combined VGA/Sound Card/hard drive controller card and floppies with drivers, but was not successful in getting it set up in my A3000T last time I tried.  I might have to put it back into an A2000 instead, like I had it before.  Although probably not needed, I added the connectors to my A2000 mobo to make all 4 ISA slots 16bit, instead of 8bit and they seemed to work fine.

I just sold my 486slc GoldenGate Bridgeboard w/doubler chip making it 50MHz, (Edit: hardlink, though not technically a real 486, Vortex did make a GoldenGate 486slc Bridgeboard) but kept my 386sx GoldenGate BB with the same chip, as I was told that after adding the upgrade CPU chip, both bridgeboards would have the same CPU speed and power.  I would like to get it all set up again for nostalgic reasons and get my Monitor Master switch to work transparently with the Amiga & Bridgeboard's display outputs.

[spirantho]

@hardlink

well said.

@crazy lunatic geeks

http://members.iinet.net.au/~davem2/overclock/a2386.html is an interesting webpage. Not tried any of it myself though!