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Author Topic: A1200 clockport, what can it be used for?  (Read 12113 times)

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Offline platon42

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Re: A1200 clockport, what can it be used for?
« on: August 28, 2009, 07:36:21 AM »
Quote from: Cammy;521215
This isn't a solution for 8MB A600/A1200 users, it's a slow option for accelerated Amigas at best. If there was a more effective way of connecting the RR-Net and suitable drivers it might be usable, but really we just need a real, dedicated ethernet or wireless card for the Amiga clockport. Maybe it could have an extra clockport on the card to daisy chain it to another expansion without requiring a splitter.


The A1200 clockport is an 8 bit databus, 4 bit address bus connector with extreme and artificial wait states to allow slow clock chips to work. 4 bit address bus means that there are a total of 16 possible addresses, each one byte wide. Each address is four bytes away from eachother, so there's no way to combine word or long word accesses to get faster access.

There was exactly one (!) card that allowed daisy chaining with exactly one other card and AFAIR it was the Melody+Twister combination. It was specifically designed to allow this kind of thing, and obviously, because each card only used part of the address space.

It is nearly magic that a USB card like the Subway actually works on that kind of bus. The Subway performs much faster on Zorro card clockports due to the better timing though.

The RRNet could work on the Amiga clockport, but it lacks an IRQ which probably makes it awkward software wise (polling for interrupt bits is a bit too retro). Anyway, the speed of such a device (or a redesigned version with IRQ support) on an original A1200 clockport probably won't be much higher than a Subway + USB Ethernet adapter solution, because in the end, it comes down to copying memory across the bottleneck of the clockport.
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Offline platon42

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Re: A1200 clockport, what can it be used for?
« Reply #1 on: August 28, 2009, 12:01:19 PM »
Quote from: Cammy;521238
I guess daisy chaining and splitting on the A1200 clockport is out of the question then.

Please don't think I was blaming Poseidon for the slow speed of the Subway/USB ethernet solution, I'm aware it's the clockport that is the real bottleneck.

I wasn't thinking that;)

Quote
But surely a new, dedicated clockport ethernet card would work with less RAM than using a USB ethernet card through Poseidon. I wouldn't have expected significant speed increase, but at least a card like this would be of use to people with un-accelerated Amigas with clockports and extra RAM, especially since PCMCIA ethernet cards will reduce most 8MB cards to 4MB, and 4MB isn't fun to use online.

You don't have to load all class drivers with Poseidon. You need the main library (120 KB), the subwayusb.device (13 KB + 16 (?) KB), the hub.class (12 KB) and the ethernet driver (18 KB + 4 (?) KB), the Poseidon overhead can probably be less than 200 KB of memory. You don't even have to load the MUI stuff... But sure, having a dedicated driver only for a clockport ethernet module would probably only need about 10-12 KB ram.

Anyway, Poseidon was not meant to be used on unaccelerated A1200 machines without additional RAM.
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Offline platon42

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Re: A1200 clockport, what can it be used for?
« Reply #2 on: August 28, 2009, 12:07:26 PM »
Quote from: JJ;521246
How do cards like the Z4 busboard work with multiple clockports ( never used mine ).  Do they run throught the zorro space ?


No. They use multiple address spaces at an offset of $4000 for each clockport (base address is 0xd80001, which clashes with some chip area on A4000D/T machines -- peeking and poking in that area on an A4000 machine causes all kinds of havok to the IDE/SCSI port). Programmers that want to support these additional boards need to adapt their drivers for it and detection of multiple clockports that are not mere mirrors of the first one, is not trivial.
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