Guaging interest in a Zorro II

[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.

[kolla]

Would it be hard to make it SATA instead of old IDE?
If you make it SATA, it would be the very first SATA controller for classic Amiga

[wawrzon]

@matthey: did you get it working? 8139 with openpci driver? i cant seem to.

[matthey]

No, I never tried it with my Mediator which has a driver that works. It needs some memory to dma into so it uses the gfx card memory. I don't know how the OpenPCI driver handles this or if it's an issue on other PCI busboards. I assumed the OpenPCI driver works on something.

[Jose]

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

[Golem!dk]

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

And fluffy bunnies?

[smf]

for $75 i would buy one for my A2000 even if i dont really need one, but then i expect the shipping to be free
If i really needed another network card i could even pay the shipping and maybe some more so the target price is very close to my what i could pay

[rkauer]

Interested and sure that more than 5 personal Brazilian friends will buy one too.

[tone007]

I'd go for a sub-$75 one even though I've already got 3 Amigas on the network.

[spirantho]

If you could really get them working for $75 a piece you'd get a truckload of orders....

There is a reason why Amiga expansion cards are so expensive, though - it's not greed, it's economies of scale. And the fact that we don't have any!

[tone007]

I personally would be pretty happy if along with the NIC there was an option for a little board to plug into the side of an A500, with the whole thing horizontal (custom cases, woohoo.)  Might sell a couple extra, who knows how many A500 owners want a taste of Ethernet.  That's one system that has about no network cards available for it.  I want iBrowse on my 500+.

[Tension]

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

You could sell a shedload of those...

[Lockon_15]

@tone007
 
Another one for A500.
Getting fully functional NIC for A500 would be the ultimate achievement, since A500 doesn't have spare CPU bandwidth or efficient bus arbitration. I have tried Subway with Ethernet dongle via A500 clockport and that's really a pain.
Hope this works out...

[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

[kolla]

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

So, proper clockport NIC, is it possible?

There is already clockport adapter for A500 and A600 available, but none for CD32. How about CDTV and A1000? The goal is ofcourse to have ethernet option for all Amigas, for tcp/ip, envoy or whatever.

[mongo]

So, proper clockport NIC, is it possible?

I'm working on one right now, actually.