The story goes basically like this: elbox took a $5 usb card with nec chipset,modified the eprom on it to have their vendor id,and then coded the driver to not work with a cheap card so they could gouge the amiga ppl $90 for a $5 card.
this hack changes the generic cheap NEC card's eprom to their vendor id so it works with the Mediator.
this is a PCI card and can only be used in the mediator. i have no idea if this works in anything other than the amiga/mediator.
mech
Ah, I see. I assume this makes the USB card not work on PCs anymore.
I can understand the desire to recoup development expense of drivers. We considered how to make money on Radeon drivers once upon a time, including packaging with cards and maybe doing something in ROM. I would not have been happy with that much of a markup, even considering how pointlessly small the market is. In the end, someone bought me dinner and a Prometheus card, and that's what I got out of my small contribution. I wish I'd had more time to get things further than where that driver got. :/
But that is a big markup, and the main point of a PCI bus into our Amigas is to get those cheap PCI cards to do things with, rather than spending Amiga price money for Zorro cards. If the PCI card ends up as expensive as a Zorro equivalent, people begin wondering why bother with PCI. Too high a price compared to PC stuff invalidates the reason for PCI in Amigas. At the same time, no drivers also invalidates the reason to get PCI, so you need to motivate someone to make drivers.
It's a tough world. And in our Amiga portion of it, things can be frustrating for users and developers alike. I'm just happy someone tries.
I have a Mediator that I've never used. The whole lack of time problem has my A3000 desktop partway along to a tower case, but not far enough to use it. Been that way for a few years now.
So I don't have experience with driver situation yet. I wish I had someplace to work on stuff and use Amigas...
