Hi there,
boards.library decodes manufacturer IDs and product IDs of Amiga autoconfig hardware. So - in short - it'll show you what stuff there is inside your machine and who made it. It's supported by other tools which provide information about your system, like "WhichAmiga" by Harry Sintonen.
The boards.library for Amiga classic systems was initially developed by Torsten Bach and then maintained by Thomas Barth from 1998 on. The last release dates back to December 2001. Jens Schoenfeld obtained the sources in December 2012 and gave them to me for further development.
UPDATE (Mar/2013): The latest version can now be obtained from Aminet:
http://aminet.net/util/libs/BoardsLib.lha
Version information:
(see Aminet readme)
Older updates:
This is a BETA release. It has been developed and tested on various Amiga hardware, both real and emulated, but may contain bugs, crash your machine and frighten your cat. Its goal is to stimulate feedback for further development. So here's what's been happening since V2.32a 12 years ago and why you should give it a try:
V2.64:
- fixed a nasty bug in the serial rewrite routine, which was the reason
why X-Surf cards were displayed as DENEB clockports
V2.63:
- added Georg Braun's products
V2.62:
- added new boards (well, that was obvious, wasn't it?)
+ Elbox releases since 2001
+ IComp releases since 2001
+ E3B products
+ WinUAE boards
- completely rewritten enclosed "showboards"-utility
- "showboards" now also supports Kickstart 1.x
- modified boards.library to support Kickstart 1.x
- refined board detection via product-ID and serial-number (see below)
- revision bump (sic!)
New ProductID and Serial detection (*please read*):
This feature is the only real enhancement of the current release. It comes in two flavours:
1) During the quite turbulent history of the Amiga, developers were not always able to obtain a unique manufacturer ID from Commodore or its successors, so they used the IDs of other manufacturers instead. boards.library is now able to display the names of the real manufacturers in such cases. You can watch this if you own an early E3B-board, like the Highway USB-Card. (Contact me if you have information about similar cases!)
2) The data structure for each autoconfig board provides a space for serial number information. However, that space does not contain real serial numbers in most cases, but has been used by manufacturers to store information about different revisions of their product, type of flash chip used, etc.
Example:
The ACA620 processor board for the A600 by Individual Computers currently exists in two revisions. Revision 1 has stability problems and can only be identified by the serial number. boards.library will provide a warning message to Rev.1 users, containing contact details for the update process.
Usage:
Just copy "boards.library" to libs:, "showboards" to c: or where ever you like and run "showboards" (There are some options, as "showboards ?" might tell you. (Well, at least for OS > V36 for now).
Developer information:
The documentation is still valid and can be found in the Aminet-archive of the old boards.library release. An update and example sources will follow.
*Your help is needed*
Get your weirdest and latest expansion boards out of your storage boxes, run showboards on your machine and give me your feedback every time you encounter an unknown board or anything strange. And if you are/were a developer of hardware yourself and know some details about you cards' serial information encoding, let me know as well.
You can find my email-address in the readme.
Planned future enhancements:
- support for chained-ConfigDev structures (board-on-board)
- Detection of non-autoconfig ACA and Indivision-cards
- PCMCIA support
- clockport support
- detect any board that's detectable (if I get the info how to do it)
Acknowledgements go to:
- Torsten Bach and Thomas Barth for starting and maintaining boards.library
- Jens Schoenfeld for the source,
- Michael Boehmer for some insights
- Toni Wilen and ELBOX for some data
and to the nice and crazy people of a1k.org for bringing me back to the Amiga.
And now just try it out. Feedback is greatly appreciated.
Best regards,
Marcus