Guaging interest in a Zorro II

[mboehmer_e3b]

A 100Mbit ZIII nic with a SATA/IDE controler would rule but will it have Zorro DMA ?

There was one. A prototype right before DENEB development started.

It's called "RAPTOR", carries one 100MBit NIC (working driver available), one parallel port (for free inside the NIC), one clockport, and one ATA port which also had a Compact Flash card connector on the board.
Ah, yes, and 2MB of FlashROM, not to forget.

Zorro DMA was foreseen, but not implemented due to complications (I used a big CPLD for logic, which is not enough for a nice, clean Zorro III DMA machine with all workarounds).

I gave it up due to cost reasons (even with two layer PCB), as the components are much more expensive than the ones used on DENEB if compared to the possibilities given by both cards. The DENEB is much more versatile.

About SATA: SATA controller chips are usually only PCI based. And they need DMA to operate. So all Zorro II machines are out, all A4000T machines, all A4000 machines with Buster 9 and one DMA Zorro III card, and all A4000x with Buster 11.

And no, I won't sell it ;-)

Michael

[mboehmer_e3b]

Well, it's too easy to fall into feature crawl and overengineering, and then things are delayed, get expensive etc.

It was not overengineering, but not knowing exactly how complicated Zorro III DMA can get if you want to workaround everthing.
From a certain point in time on it was clear that more flexible logic and internal memory was needed, so the CPLD solution was simply not fitting any more.

So, proper clockport NIC, is it possible?

Possible - yes. 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.

It is really hard to estimate on how many modules one can sell, and if the amount of time, work and money put in will ever pay.

Michael