Amiga 286 BridgeBoard questions

[melott]

I bought an A2500 on EBay....(a very nice machine)
It had a bonus, an A2286 BridgeBoard with a harddrive
and 5 1/4 floppy dedicated to the board.

A couple questions ....
I have No 5 1/4 floppies, will this board reconize
a 1.44 HD 3 1/2 floppy??

Also, How do I make it to work  :-? ??
I got no manuals with the machine.
There is alot of PC stuff on the drive but no Dos.

Some general info on this board would also be great.

[graffias79]

Hi

One of my A2500s has a bridgeboard 286 installed in it as well.  I have never used it, however there is a 3.5" FDD installed in a drive bay converter connected to that card so I'm assuming it would work.  Now I'm not sure if it's a DS/DD or DS/HD drive though.

-Jamie

[Brian]

http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/search.pl?product=A2286&company=

Some info avialable there such as that it will support standard HD 3.5" diskdrive and also 1.2Mb 5.25" diskdrives. Driversdisk is also available from that site.

[Noster]

Hi

If you are familiar with the german language or know one who could read it this would be an interesting side for you:

http://home.arcor.de/kickstart/TKA/Tutorials/bridgeboard/index.html

and how about this:

http://www.iol.ie/~ecarroll/bridgeboard.html

and for the software you should have a look here:

http://home.t-online.de/home/r.benda/software.html

Noster

[melott]

Ummm .... thanks but I'm afraid that won't help
much, .. I don't read or speak German.

I don't know if I would even use the card but I'd
still like to know how it works.

[MAD]

Hoya!

Well, even if everything works ok, WHERE will you get 5 1/4 disks today?

Moreover, are there STILL peecee proggies which will run on a 286-specs machine???

Be funky

M A D

[Will-i-am]

I bought an A2000 with a bridgecard, but mine is an 8088! If I'm lucky I can load Win3.1 on it, but I'm not sure..in the meantime I do know that there is a heck of a lot of software that will run on a 286. You can download it from various sites and there are also, strangely enough, boxed new progs you can sometimes find in cut-out baskets at Staples and other computer stores. I was amazed at the stuff I have found at garage sales too.....Virus checkers, spreadsheets, word processors...games galore.....basic programming is very easy to find. Sometimes Staples has CDs with hundreds of games on them, many of which can run under DOS. Just look around...By the way, if anyone knows if you can upgrade an 8088 Bridgecard to at least a 386, let me know!

[Acill]

You can run Win95 just fine on the 286 cards. I dont know much about them, but I have seen one in use with Win95 and even win98. I would not put anything other then Win95 at most on it though.

[spirantho]

With an 8088 you can run Windows/286, but I think Win 3.1 is out. I'm fairly sure Windows for Workgroups is out, though, as it requires a 386 and Win95 cannot physically run on anything less than a 386; even if it did it'd be abominably slow.
You'll have trouble loading XMS with an 8088 too, as HIMEM.SYS requires an 80x286 CPU...

It is true, though, there is a fair amount of stuff... just this weekend I got my PowerPC board in my A500 firing up (using my Reference 40 HDD as a SCSI interface to my Zip drive - it appears to be compatible with the Dataflyer, luckily) and have got Railroad Tycoon running ok... I'm sure Ultima 1-5 and probably 6 will run too, and Civ should be fine....

Oh, Powermonger runs on 286s too, and comes on 5.25" floppies originally, but you can download it these days.

Incidentally, your 2286 will run 1.44MB floppies fine, but if you're going to use it get an ISA SVGA card as CGA won't run anything fun.... (apart from adventure games, of course!)

[AltRN8]

I have a Bridgeboard card that was upgraded to a 486. This makes the card more usable. The biggest problem I had with it was getting enough memory to the PC side to run anything large. Its been a long time since I played with it but I believe the problems I had were all based on the limit to the amoutn of RAM you could have on the Zorro II bus.

I got it during my every major OS in one box phase.

[Holley]

Windows 3.0 will run on an 8088 or 8086 with 512Kb of memory, Windows 3.1 won't (it requires the 'real mode' that 80286s have).

If Windows95 was running on a bridgeboard then it must have had a 386, you used to be able to get accellerators that would take any 8MHz 286 to a 16MHz 386 - if you could find one it'd work in a bridgeboard, though if the clock frequency was different it might take some persuasion!