Guaging interest in a Zorro II

[aperez]

For over a year now, I've been wanting to design and sell an Ethernet card for the Amiga 2000/3000/4000 and 1200. Recently, an Ariadne II card sold on eBay for US $122, and I regularly see them sell for over $75.

The Ariadne II card is quite basic, and uses a bog-standard QFP100 Realtek RTL8019AS with a PLD for glue logic interfacing to the Zorro bus.

If there were interest in 25-50 of them, I would genuinely be motivated to work on a new clone based on the RTL8019 or possibly the RTL8029. Since there's already a SANA II driver, I would not need to write a new driver for it, thus significantly accelerating development time. I'd also like to get it to be usable via the A1200 clockport, so you wouldn't necessarily have to tie up the PCMCIA port (a pain in an A1200 tower) or could use other peripheral cards, such as SCSI II.

What do you all think? The target price would be under $75, with Zorro cards to be produced first, since there's the least amount of choice/viable options here.

http://www.nightfallcrew.com/?p=1218 and http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/search.pl?product=ariadne#ariadne2 for more info/photos.

[aperez]

*nod* $50 would be ideal, truly. $60 is probably an achievable goal. The price comes down the more PCBs I opt to crank out,  hence the open question here about what people think about the prospect.  The component costs are more or less fixed.

[aperez]

Theres already a clockport NIC...RRNet...someone has written a driver already but isn't 100% finished due to broken amiga and lack of motivation...

@DJBase: I've known about the RR-Net "port" to Amiga for some time, but the reality is there's no fully-functional driver, which makes it of zero use *in practice* to those who might otherwise actually consider it.

[aperez]

I think it's only worth it if you can keep the price absurdly low, because for not much more money you can go Deneb + Ethernet dongle.

I hear what you're saying, but honestly $75 is a long way from $200+$15 USB dongle of questionable compatiblity. I'd like to make two versions, one with some sort of IDE-bootable interface ala buddha on-board, and one that's ethernet-only.

[aperez]

Nowadays there are plenty of NICs availablem, some with more intelligence, some with less.
Depends on how many interested people are there, and especially who can do driver programming.

Are there NICs available? Yes. Are they overpriced? Absolutely. Zorro NICs are routinely selling for well over $100-$150 USD and there are *not* functioning Ethernet options for the A500 or A1000.

Agreed, but I am not subject to the regulartory issues you are in Germany, and this is why these sorts of projects are better suited to being open, given the age of the platform. Cheap runs are still viable.

[aperez]

The obvious solution is to bring native, non-bridged PCI to the Amiga. Zorro is dead, and ZIII-capable Super Busters cost upwards of $40.

[aperez]

I'm well aware of the limitations you've outlined, and I think the best way to work around the challenges they present is to do it *where the bus arbitration actually happens* eg, Super Buster. You've got a standard 84-pin PLCC socket to work with. 84-pin, 5V high-density CPLDs are *much* cheaper and easier to obtain. The basic logic needed to bring the machine into a booted/usable state can be captured with the logic analyzer I already possess.

[aperez]

Maybe instead of re-inventing the wheel, someone should try and finish up the driver(s) for the RR-Net? It would be funny to have a RR-Net hanging off my X-Surf

Pan,

There's nothing to "finish" since this oft-spoken-of driver is not available in any form, much less source. What would you propose I do about that?

The CS8900A which the RR-Net is based on is available on a DIP-socketed proto board from people like SparkFun for $35:

Additionally, the CS8900A in the RR-Net is used in 8-bit mode, which Jens himself has stated does not allow the use of interrupts: "The chip is used in 8-bit mode, so the 8 registers of an NE2000 are spread over 16 registers in an 8-bit system. The 8-bit mode of the chip does not support IRQs (see Cirrus logic application note AN181)."

That said, the chip itself does support interrupt-mode, and Jens' documentation states that "Although the Amiga makes the interrupt status queue registers available, it does not have any effect. Even if you try to activate the chip's IRQ features, it will not have any effect. The IRQ line of the chip is not wired on RR-Net at all!" but the pin for it is not passed through on the overpriced RR-Net.

And, taken directly from the Cirrus Logic Application Note itself:
"Unsupported functions in 8 bit mode:

* Interrupts are not supported. Polled mode must be used
* The DMA engine only uses 16-bit memory accesses and does not support 8 bit transfers.
* The packet page pointer has an auto increment feature that cannot be used in 8-bit mode
* An EEPROM  is not supported"

Citations:
http://www.cirrus.com/jp/pubs/appNote/an181.pdf
From: http://www.schoenfeld.de/inside/Inside_RRnet.txt

http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=200