WTB: Amiga 2000 486 Bridgeboard

[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!

[hardlink]

I still have the WinStorm combined VGA/Sound Card/hard drive controller card and floppies with drivers, ...

(envy=)I have been looking for one of those for about 15 years now.(/envy)

[mechy]

I ran a 2386 overclocked for many years back in the day. the cpu was heatsinked(and most other warm chips) and overclocked with a different oscillator(i think i pushed my 25mhz board to 33?)and using a diamond speedstar(or was it stealth?) video card allows the isa bus to run near double speed. ram access on the old bridgeboard was not too bad for the time.It actually ran win95 somewhat useable,the 2386 had the capability to use the amiga's floppy and cdrom shared which was handy. there were many 386_>486 upgrades to bring it to a 486/50mhz system.A prog off aminet called amems152(amigaEMS update) would allow you to steal amiga side ram for the bridgeboard.Using SXSERV16 from aminet(must use a gfx card) was much better software than the original Janus.the system actually had better benchmarks that a comparable real 486 the same speed.many years ago there was a company that offered soldering on a new ti486slc50 chip to upgrade the 2386 to a 486sx.
They used to tell me windows 98 would not run on the 2386,but i also managed to get it to run,but it was slow and useless,but DOES work. bbguide.lha and such are good things to read.
Oh yea, PCtask is not that usefull imho and sorry no spare A2386

Anyone selling an A2000 486 bridgeboard?
Or does PC Task do just as well of a job?

[spirantho]

I'll try and get some bridgeboard MIPS shots later, but in the meantime, this is what my A1 G4@800 can do! All running under OS4.1 (Remember: to run PC-Task you may need to clear your languages in your Locale prefs). The pictures are DOSBox, PC-Task Dynamic and PC-Task Interpretive respectively!

I downloaded MIPS from

http://ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/msdos/sysinfo/mips.zip

More benchmarks please! And before anyone says anything, yes, I know MIPS is a completely meaningless benchmark, especially on emulators, but if we're comparing like machines then it may give us some clue!

[Zac67]

There are no 486 class bridgeboards or even Pentium ones. Period.

The best you can get are 386SX class boards (16 bit bus). Many can be upgraded with a 486SLC but that's far below a 386DX or even a 486. It's got a 486 instruction set (no FPU), a small cache and is faster than the 386SX but that's dog slow anyway.

If you abandon the 'bridge' concept you can use most CPU boards intended for passive backplanes - you'll have a completely separated PC running inside your Amiga and have to provide the communication yourself (NICs, serial/parallel, whatever).

I've run a 100 MHz Pentium board in my 3000 for a while but it failed to make a point with an Athlon Thunderbird sitting right next to it.

[Xanxi]

I have a more advanced version of MIPS (1.20) that i believe is the latest.

Here are screenshots from my A1200/AGA/Blizz1260@50MHz with PC-Task 4.4 Dynamic and Interpretative modes.

http://www.dropbox.com/gallery/12597178/1/PC-Task?h=ca7f85



That's strange how my miggy seems to do good on all results but finally get a weak overall score compared to your DosBox/PCTask AOne.

[Xanxi]

There are no 486 class bridgeboards or even Pentium ones. Period.

The best you can get are 386SX class boards (16 bit bus). Many can be upgraded with a 486SLC but that's far below a 386DX or even a 486. It's got a 486 instruction set (no FPU), a small cache and is faster than the 386SX but that's dog slow anyway.

If you abandon the 'bridge' concept you can use most CPU boards intended for passive backplanes - you'll have a completely separated PC running inside your Amiga and have to provide the communication yourself (NICs, serial/parallel, whatever).

I've run a 100 MHz Pentium board in my 3000 for a while but it failed to make a point with an Athlon Thunderbird sitting right next to it.

Sure but those "single board computers" are not the same fun in my opinion, and won't make any use of all ISA slots Commodore have brought to us.

[spirantho]

Here's some more benchmarks for anyone interested!

These are:
A4000 (CSPPC) OS 4 dynamic
A4000 OS 4 interpretive
A4000 OS 3.9 dynamic
A4000 OS 3.9 interpretive
GoldenGate 486SLC25 (with FAST mode)

[spirantho]

And just for the heck of it:

A KCS PowerPC board in an A500.

The one thing it really proves is that you can't trust benchmarks in an emulator. The benchmarks for the hardware should be reliable, though (or at least as reliable as MIPS ever are!)

[Iggy]

Here's some more benchmarks for anyone interested!

These are:
A4000 (CSPPC) OS 4 dynamic
A4000 OS 4 interpretive
A4000 OS 3.9 dynamic
A4000 OS 3.9 interpretive
GoldenGate 486SLC25 (with FAST mode)

I didn't look at the others, but I'm confused by the last. It makes an XT look much better than an AT. I'm no big X86 fan, but there seems to be something wrong with these numbers.

[Xanxi]

Yes, this benchmark is puzzling.
Comparing my 1260 results to the GG, i do not understand how i get superior results in all categories but an inferior overall results.
Compaq 386 also stands for the first 386 PC made, which i believe was running a 386 sx 16 MHz.

[spirantho]

I don't think the overall score is an average or anything like that. On an emulator I think the numbers are pretty meaningless really.

As for the XT being faster than the AT, not sure how you get that. Remember the numbers are how much faster than the baseline your machine is, i.e. 22 against the XT means your machine is 22 times faster than an XT.

[AmigaEd]

Just out of curiosity is there some place where I can find a technical description of how the bridge board interfaces with the Amiga and how the Janus software works?

Regards,
AmigaEd

[Zac67]

Compaq 386 also stands for the first 386 PC made, which i believe was running a 386 sx 16 MHz.

Nope - the DX predates the SX by several years(!) and started out as low as 12 MHz. The first common machines were 16 MHz though IIRC. The SX was added to increase 386 software support by enabling entry level systems.

[Amiga_Nut]

Yea, I have a great DOS machine now but just thought I'd ask....  ;-)

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 thought about getting a KVM to save monitor space but that isn't really ideal either as I need different size monitors for all these machines I have...  a Mac Mini, a PC, an A2000, a DOS machine....   etc.

I need to get a table like Cammy has!

Thanks for all the replys...   ;-)

486 bridgeboard went for about 30 bucks last week on scumbay I think...may have been week before.

They do have a cool factor though yes. R@RE just means it's expensive until the next cash stricken person lists it up on scumbay for 0.99 on a free listing weekend lol

Stuff is only worth what ONE person will pay as a maximum, reality is nobody actually wants most of this stuff and it goes for peanuts when it does appear on scumbay so comes down to how desperate people are. I sold The Pawn on 5 1/4 floppy for a 'RARE' format for 60+ bucks, but without that one guy it would have gone for 15-20 probably.

[Hammer]

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

Family = 6th.

Intel Core™ i7-720QM Processor still uses 80xxx i.e. aka 80601