Elbox SharkPPC G3/G4

[carvedeye]

so piru are you saying that these will just fit straight into a mediator and will be plug and play? that would be awesome if that is the case.

[Piru]

these will just fit straight into a mediator and will be plug and play?

No

[Tension]

What drivers?

If someone still thinks that "SharkPPC" was anything more than just a plot to sell more Mediators (with vague promise of PPC PCI card for OS4) you need to smell the coffee...

I wonder how many people bought the Mediator after drinking the Kool-Aid.

[Gavilan]

I wonder how many people bought the Mediator after drinking the Kool-Aid.

/me raises his hand...
:shocked::shocked:

[Karlos]

I wonder what became of their other project, the Dragon.

[Crom00]

I wonder what became of their other project, the Dragon.

There's pictures of it on their website. They had a prototype but ran into somekind of technical snag. Either it wasn't cost effective or they could'nt get it to work fast enough to be worth the effort.

But from what I see of the progress on the Atari Coldfire project it should be doable.

[Gavilan]

Either it wasn't cost effective or they could'nt get it to work fast enough to be worth the effort

Or maybe both?

I vaguely remember something about the "prototype"...

I think they never ever sent a press release after the first one "announcing" the introduction of the Dragon?? Im sure they didnt go any further and they didnt answer specific questiones. Only vaguely questions or tivial questions.

But, on the other hand...Elbox is one of the few companies qho is still commited to Amiga, like it or not, being happy with the Spider-Chris Hodges affair and with other things...

I wouldn mind if the SharkPPC was a Sonnet card, a Mac card adopted to Amiga...as long as i had it running in my A1200...i would have been so so happy...

[MskoDestny]

I wonder what became of their other project, the Dragon.

It does seem rather odd that they would abandon it after getting so far along in development. The board they were showing at that one Amiga meet looked like the finished product and from the pictures appeared to be running Workbench and some other software.

There's pictures of it on their website. They had a prototype but ran into somekind of technical snag. Either it wasn't cost effective or they could'nt get it to work fast enough to be worth the effort.

At the time they claimed they were having difficulty obtaining a sufficient supply of the Coldfire processors, but that was BS. The most compelling argument I saw put forth was that the high overhead involved with the instruction trap approach to emulating the missing instructions made the price/performance ratio crappy compared to existing accelerators based on the 680X0 line. It doesn't make sense to me that they would get that close to production before figuring that out though. You would also think that they would just come out and say that if it were the case rather than just making excuses for a while and then going quiet without removing it from their site.

But from what I see of the progress on the Atari Coldfire project it should be doable.

The Atari Coldfire Project is interesting and it might be a good base for some sort of "Super Minimig", but I wouldn't get too excited yet. Right now they've got an Open Source version of TOS running on it along with a few test programs. Those are probably all compiled natively for Coldfire so aren't relying on the emulation traps. It will be a little while before we see what the performance is like for software compiled for older 680X0 CPUs.

[Zac67]

They will fit into any PCI slot but won't let you do anything at all with them. If there was a way to make them work on a Mediator or any other PCI board, Elbox would've made a fortune years ago. It's not only a driver problem, but most probably a hardware problem.

To put it straight: SharkPPCs have never ever existed. Elbox probably planned to remarket the Crescendo 7200 just like they did/do the Spider but gave that up soon after. Since there still are people believing in that scheme they left it on their site, possibly selling the odd Mediator board.

[quarkx]

You also have to remember, the price difference. They probably knew or know, if they ever released it at Eur 300 then people would be up in arms since the same hardware for the Apple could be had for less the $50. No amount of reasoning could justify the price difference for just for the drivers and software. It would have exposed them as blatantly ripping off the Amiga community, so instead, they just chose to abandon the whole thing.