Sonnet PPC PCI Card

[mboehmer_e3b]

JJ wrote:
My memory is not the best, But I am pretty sure that the sonnet cards are electrically incompatible with the old mediators.

In particular, the Sonnet needs 3.3V on PCI bus for operation of its bridge. With 3.3V supplied it was possible to initiate the PCI booting sequence of the PPC on a modified Prometheus board, but due to lack of software (which is needed to startup the Sonnet) I stopped my tests here.

As long as direct PCI-to-Amiga DMA does not work on PCI boards  it doesn't make any sense to work with the Sonnet, as all motherboard and Zorro resources are not useable (so you could setup a second independent PCI computer system based on the Sonnet, but no more).

Michael

Michael

[mboehmer_e3b]

tokyoracer wrote:
It would be good to hear is anyone has even attempted this on an Amiga PCI busboard.

I tried on a modified Prometheus with 3.3V supply on PCI slots.
Without 3.3V you can't do anything.

With 3.3V supplied and the correct initialization steps on the PCI bus done you can get the PPC starting to fetch its boot strap from some PCI memory (like the gfx card).

As someone else here explained in rather nice detail (seems to have also played with :-) ) it doesn't make real sense, as you can't get over the PCI bus to the Classic hardware at all, and even if you try it will be a pain.

The bridge used (at least on my Sonnets) is a Tsi107.

Michael

[mboehmer_e3b]

Im quite sure i've seen a driver for the shark in the mediator drivers, if its there it might reveal some clues

I think I've seen it too, if I remember correctly it was in the same directory as the Dragon driver? Or the eflash1200 software? Maybe it was also the MPEG-2/DVD PCI card driver directory? The name of the directory was "Vapour", I guess...

Face it: from a technical point of view it doesn't make any sense to operate the Sonnect card on a PCI bus board, even if it had the required 3.3V power supply rail installed as requested by the PCI spec, unless you have true PCI-Amiga DMA cycle conversion to allow clean and performant accesses to the classic Amiga mainboard.

Did I note that the Sonnect needs +5V DIMMs, which are *really* hard to get?

Michael

P.S.: if you find any sarcasm here, just keep it.