A new Zorro III memory board

[Tenacious]

I've often wondered why none of the remaining hardware makers have come out with a Zorro III memory card that could be populated with modern memory modules.  It can't be that difficult.

I would buy two in a second.

Would anyone else buy in?

[TjLaZer]

I agree, why?

My guess is too small a market, but a small run of em should sell.  100-200 easy.

I'd pay $100 for a 2GB SD-RAM board.  

[rkauer]

 I think Jens Schoenfeld is the guy to make such a board like this.

 Why noone think about this before?

[AMC258]

I've been pondering this since the day I bought my A3000.  Back before they put the SIMMs on the CSPPC when DIMMs were the standard!

I know I'll get flamed again for saying it again, but 146M of RAM is just not enough for me!  I do use it up all the time.  I'd break the bank for 1G.  Heck, I'd live with 256M.  This "you don't need 128M on an Amiga" thing holds as much water with me as "640k ought to be enough for anyone".  Just like, you don't need SCSI, and 3 reboots on every cold start is acceptable.

[HammerD]

Anyone running OS4 on a A3/4000/4000T could definately benefit from this board.  

I have OS4 on 96MB of FAST ram and after booting there is not a lot of ram free.  Need some more breathing room...

If that card wasn't too expensive - like 199 CAD ...and let's say capable of putting 4 DDR or SDRAM modules on it I would definately buy it.  Even though Z3 ram will be much slower, at least it will be ram.

Having said that, OS4 is an absolute amazing upgrade vs. OS 3.9 and I would highly recommend it to anyone who has a PPC (or even doesn't but can get one) that continues to enjoy the use of the classic Amiga.  It definately makes the machine feel way more modern, yet keeps the Amiga feeling.  Really amazing product.

[TjLaZer]

This opens up another can of worms.  We need a new PPC card!  If anyone is going to make anything this would be it.  A PPC G4 card with SD-RAM Slots on it for 512MB to 2GB RAM would ROCK!!!

[robo-ant]

Up to two years ago, I definitely would have bought into that.  Memory was the thing I most needed on my A3K.  I wanted to find a DKB3128, but those boards are hard to come by!

Now I've moved to Amithlon and memory is not a problem for me anymore.  Now the problem is that my PC is too slow to run hardware-banging games and demos properly in E-UAE.  But that means that my classic hardware is still useful.

I agree with other posters that the thing the Classic market really needs at the moment is more PPC cards.  Those should take modern memory modules.

The Zorro III memory card might still be a good idea.  I don't think it should be difficult to make one.  How big is the market?

[matthey]

The Mediator, Prometheus, and G-Rex can take PCI cards with plenty of FAST graphics memory. Even though there would be no drivers for these "newer" gfx cards, it shouldn't be too difficult to find there memory address and add it to the free memory. I'm surprised no one has done this. I thought about doing it at one time as I have a Mediator but I would have to deal with Elbox and sign their exclusive non-disclosure agreement for their super top secrets. It's much more important to keep the competition at bay in this huge Amiga market than have lots of software for their products after all. Too bad they have this closed minded attitude as they make excellent hardware.

[countzero]

I doubt any FAST ram on a mediator would be faster than regular zorro3 ram. The CSPPC reaches the mediator through zorro3 interface AFAIK. as for the BPPC and mediator, I have no idea. GRex is another matter though, it's independent of zorro3 bus.

[matthey]

Sure, the Mediator would be limited by Zorro3 speed. The speed of the memory on a gfx card would not be the bottleneck is what I was trying to say. The memory would be faster than almost all existing Zorro memory cards. It would be relatively slow for a PowerPC and maybe even a 68060. Faster CPU local memory would be used first. It would certainly be faster than any kind of virtual memory.

[mboehmer_e3b]

The Mediator, Prometheus, and G-Rex can take PCI cards with plenty of FAST graphics memory. Even though there would be no drivers for these "newer" gfx cards, it shouldn't be too difficult to find there memory address and add it to the free memory.

All PCI memory "solutions" you list up here have three common problems:

(1) memory on gfx cards is optimized for writing. It is dead slow on reading, as usually you don't read it in normal operation. Reading on PCI may lead to delayed transactions, with penalty in time and the risk of Buster timeouts (can be seen when accessing PCI-PCI bridges or FlashROM on gfx cards).

(2) no gfx mem access without gfx processor initialization. The gfx mem is only accessible via the GPU, and this beast needs to be setup correctly.

(3) Endianess. Some gfx cards change the byte order of the memory when changing screen modes. In case you switch to a new screen, your memory gets scrambled. Bad idea.

Michael

[matthey]

mboehmer_e3b wrote:

(1) memory on gfx cards is optimized for writing. It is dead slow on reading, as usually you don't read it in normal operation. Reading on PCI may lead to delayed transactions, with penalty in time and the risk of Buster timeouts (can be seen when accessing PCI-PCI bridges or FlashROM on gfx cards).

Slow is relative. Zorro3 speeds are slow compared to what a gfx card can move around. The Mediator already uses a part of gfx memory for 10/100 nic cards which is read when it's transferred to the Amiga memory. The 10/100 nic cards aren't blazing speed but faster than Zorro II 10mbit cards in most cases. Do the buster problems occur with a Revision 11 buster?

(2) no gfx mem access without gfx processor initialization. The gfx mem is only accessible via the GPU, and this beast needs to be setup correctly.

Are all gfx cards this way?

(3) Endianess. Some gfx cards change the byte order of the memory when changing screen modes. In case you switch to a new screen, your memory gets scrambled. Bad idea.

I was talking about using a 2nd gfx card just for the memory on it. No screens = no byte order swapping. Some gfx cards probably wouldn't work well as an Amiga "memory card". Choose ones that do. E-bay has tons of used PCI gfx cards for next to nothing.

[TetiSoft]

@HammerD

Anyone running OS4 on a A3/4000/4000T could definately benefit from this board.

OS4Classic does not use motherboard memory (except ChipRAM)
and Zorro memory. It would be slow and the new memory
system is no longer designed for multiple blocks of memory
with different speeds.

[downix]

OS/4 wouldn't be able to use it I'd imagine.  But, no reason it would not work.  I have a DDR2 core if someone has a Zorro III core I could mate it up to.

[stopthegop]

This must be possible on the Amiga because its already been done on other 68K platforms.