Guaging interest in a Zorro II

[aperez]

For over a year now, I've been wanting to design and sell an Ethernet card for the Amiga 2000/3000/4000 and 1200. Recently, an Ariadne II card sold on eBay for US $122, and I regularly see them sell for over $75.

The Ariadne II card is quite basic, and uses a bog-standard QFP100 Realtek RTL8019AS with a PLD for glue logic interfacing to the Zorro bus.

If there were interest in 25-50 of them, I would genuinely be motivated to work on a new clone based on the RTL8019 or possibly the RTL8029. Since there's already a SANA II driver, I would not need to write a new driver for it, thus significantly accelerating development time. I'd also like to get it to be usable via the A1200 clockport, so you wouldn't necessarily have to tie up the PCMCIA port (a pain in an A1200 tower) or could use other peripheral cards, such as SCSI II.

What do you all think? The target price would be under $75, with Zorro cards to be produced first, since there's the least amount of choice/viable options here.

http://www.nightfallcrew.com/?p=1218 and http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/search.pl?product=ariadne#ariadne2 for more info/photos.

[Gulliver]

Interesting, it all depends of course on the estimated final price and the real performance (kb/s) one could get.
If both aspects are well carried out, then you have aproduct! Count me in.

Good Luck

[kolla]

Ethernet for the clockport would be excellent, it's something I've wanted ever since the "discovery" of the clockport

[cv643d]

I think you would be able to sell 25 cards on ebay for 75 dollar each, no problems.

[Tajmaster]

Id buy a zorro or clockport base ethernet card but 75$ is waaay too much. Call me tight but I begrudge paying over the odds in Amiga land, weve all gotta live in the real world folks and eating food comes before anything remotley Amiga

[Matt_H]

I think it's only worth it if you can keep the price absurdly low, because for not much more money you can go Deneb + Ethernet dongle.

[Jose]

I too would be interested but it would depend on the final price.

[djbase]

Theres already a clockport NIC...RRNet...someone has written a driver already but isn't 100% finished due to broken amiga and lack of motivation...

[motrucker]

I would be interested in A Zorro card, specially if you could get the price down to $50 or $60. I can likely live with $75 if it must be.

[aperez]

*nod* $50 would be ideal, truly. $60 is probably an achievable goal. The price comes down the more PCBs I opt to crank out,  hence the open question here about what people think about the prospect.  The component costs are more or less fixed.

[aperez]

Theres already a clockport NIC...RRNet...someone has written a driver already but isn't 100% finished due to broken amiga and lack of motivation...

@DJBase: I've known about the RR-Net "port" to Amiga for some time, but the reality is there's no fully-functional driver, which makes it of zero use *in practice* to those who might otherwise actually consider it.

[aperez]

I think it's only worth it if you can keep the price absurdly low, because for not much more money you can go Deneb + Ethernet dongle.

I hear what you're saying, but honestly $75 is a long way from $200+$15 USB dongle of questionable compatiblity. I'd like to make two versions, one with some sort of IDE-bootable interface ala buddha on-board, and one that's ethernet-only.

[Cammy]

Ooh, I'd absolutely love a Clockport Ethernet card for my A1200 and A600 so I can go online with a full 8MB Fast RAM

[persia]

Ace idea.  You should have no trouble selling the boards.

[matthey]

Why not use the RTL8139 and make the first 100 Mbit Amiga Zorro card? There is an 8139 OpenPCI driver that could be modified.