A2386SX bridgeboard problems

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Hello, you are not ripped off. I stand by my board and if you think it's defective you can always send it back to me and I'll refund your money whenever you like.

now we've set this clear, I tested the board on an A3000. You might be experiencing zorro2 space problems. Do you have other cards installed ? The battery definitely won't kill the board, it was fine before I sent it your way.

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It never said it was defective. This board ALWAYS showed up in the early config menu as working. However, I couldn't get it to work 1st due to incompatible driver disk I got off amiga hardware database (the download is for A2286 disk which has an incompatible janus.library), 2nd I insisted on using 4mb ZIP ram I was sure to be working, which turned out be defective (I verified this on my octagon board). Even with the faulty ram, it showed up as WORKING on the config menu. Though the janus.library didn't load properly, giving one long three short beeps. So I switched to 1mb ram, and everything was fine.

Now, I think you should learn some facts about the machine you're trying to use before you accuse people with ripping off ppl. Zorro2 bus has a limited memory space (8mb). All cards you install occupy a portion of this memory space, and anything over 8mb is unusable because of 68000 addressing limitations (Even if you have a 68020+ Zorro2 has this limitation). The faulty board notification in the early startup shows the bridgeboard is conflicting with some of your boards. Take your boards out and try again.

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you definitely have to take out the 8mb ram card. That alone fills up the whole zorro2 space ! Or configure it to 4mb.

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don't give up on it cause it's a good card. As I said before, I can refund your money whenever you like.

Serial and parallel interfaces take up only 64k on the zorro2 space, and they have a special location reserved for them. See amiga system memory map here. Your 8mb ram board takes up all the auto config space (20000-9FFFFF). Your IO boards are placed in secondary auto config space (E90000-EFFFFF). The bridgeboard occupies 2mb from main autoconfig space.

amiga hardware database

when installed, only 6 MB of the Zorro II address space is left for other expansion cards

you're definitely having a conflict with the ram card. Just take it off. It's slow as hell anyway when compared to fast ram on your GVP.

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You don't understand. You can't just bin it. I want it BACK I can't let you waste a good card !

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the diode is to prevent the board from recharging the lithium coin, which is not rechargable. I'm not sure if there exists a 3.6 lithium coin battery (I couldn't find). So fitting a proper 3.6 NiMH may be the best approach .

If the board doesn't work for you somehow, I'ld like to have it back for what you paid to me. You don't need to give it away for $20 or something. I'm not sure what kind of performance you'll get by using an ISA board through the bridgeboard. Using a proper Zorro card is the best approach. You're in luck, cause soon X Surf 3 boards will be in stock, which give you much better performance you can ever have from an ISA card. The price is just right too. you can buy it with my refund and probably have some change back.

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Zac67 wrote:

Don't want to confuse you, but the XSurf is an ISA card - adapted to Z2, of course.

Yes but it runs natively under amigaOS. What the bridgeboard does is run some kind of server on the pc side to transfer packets from the ISA network card to amigaOS through the bridgeboard interface. Which one do you think will work better ?