Amiga Bridgeboards

[trixster]

How many of you guys are using a bridgeboard in your Amiga? There’s a few big threads on A1k.org and I know those guys are really into the entire Amiga/PC thing.

I’m using a Vortex Golden Gate 486SLC2 in my A3000 along with an ATI Mach64 ISA graphics card and a Monitor Master. The board has 16mb, Cyrix FasMath FPU, a 512MB IDE DOM, and most importantly a Texas Instruments TI486SXLC 50 cpu upgrade. The standard Cyrix CX486SLC2-50 has just 1kb L1 cache but the TI version has 8kb - this makes a big difference to the overall speed of the board which is normally somewhat limited by the cpu’s 32/16bit bus.

Anyway, here’s a video showing a few DOS games:

[ Show youtube player ]

The A3000 only has two ISA slots so that precludes use of a soundcard, however hopefully the project on A1k will address that

[E-Penguin]

I've just bought a KCS Power Board, out of curiosity. No idea what I'm going to do with it. Probably install ms dos, go "cool, dos on my Amiga!" and never touch it again. Still, it works as a 1mb ram expansion if nothing else!

[scuzz]

Hi

2000

http://www.scuzzscink.com/amiga/scuz...may18_1501.htm

KCS

http://www.scuzzscink.com/amiga/scuz...ber17_2801.htm

http://www.scuzzscink.com/amiga/scuz...ber17_2602.htm

1060

http://www.scuzzscink.com/amiga/scuz...rch18_1602.htm

scuzz
http://www.scuzzscink.com/amiga/scuzzblog.htm

[trixster]

Very nice! Lovely setups

[E-Penguin]

I don't think the board I bought comes with any disks. Can anyone hook me up with something?

[trixster]

Is the disk on here?

http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/powerpc

[E-Penguin]

The manual I found suggests there are other disks for the pc part, with various dos drivers/devices. I'll have a go and see what happens.

[trixster]

Try this thread:

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=85385

BlindGerMan might be able to help you out, maybe pm him here or on Amibay

[nexus]

i have the goldengate 486slc2 and a2386 though on the golden gate i have IBM SLC2/3 bluelightnings yet to try also a bunch of 32bit bus with ram PC98 accelerators to try on it lol
if you didnt know the blue lightnings are the fastest you can get for 386sx bus they were made by IBM when intel gave them designs and have real 486 instructions and 16kb cache and are the 1st clock triple cpus
IBM also made the best Cyrix design too
regarding PC-98 accels they can be had easy on japan auctions

IBM PS/2 upgrade^
also you can run a 32bit cpu in a 16bit bus by the /BS16 pin
blue lightnings came in 16bit and 32bit versions the 32bit are BLC2/3 you can tell by the 132pin config of them where 16bit bus SLC2/3 are 100pin

http://ps-2.kev009.com/pcpartnerinfo/ctstips/b01a.htm

anyways i was just about to open a A2500 and have some fun with these

[trixster]

Very cool, I hope it works ok!

[nexus]

only sad thing is our machs no 3D version was made for ISA
did a lot of research on them and was hoping i could use 1 from a PCI/VL-Bus card but they are different chips
Variants:

"Mach64 CX/210888" - Original chipset, uncommon (up to 2 MB DRAM, or 4 MB VRAM)
"Mach64 GX/210888GX" - Enhanced video playback capabilities
"Mach64 ET/210888ET" - Embedded???
"Mach64 CT/264CT - Cost-reduced Mach64 with integrated RAMDAC and clock chip (up to 2 MB DRAM)
"Mach64 VT/264VT - AMC connector (Support for TV-tuner)
"Mach64 GT/264GT 3D Rage" - 3D capabilities
"Mach64 GT-B/264GT-B 3D Rage II - SDRAM & SGRAM support(up to 8 MB)
"Mach64 LT/264LT" - Low-power mobile version of Mach64 GT

[roondar]

On the topic of bridgeboards, I've had a KCS Power PC board in my A500 for a while now and would love to try it out. However, my internal disk drive is a HxC Slim emulator and I've never managed to succeed in imaging the supplied MS DOS etc disks.

Does anyone know how I can get a working .hfe image out of the supplied disks?

[E-Penguin]

Have you got Linux, or cygwin if using Windows? You can use dd to extract an image, which can be converted to an hfe, according to the hxc website at least. You'd need a floppy drive in the pc, of course.

dd if=/dev/fd0 of=filename.img bs=1024

If you do happen to create image files please let me know

[ScottJ85]

My father used to have a Goldengate 486SLC in his Amiga 2000. He used it for work, I used it to play early 90s shareware games I'd buy from the local computer shop for two bucks per disk.

[Tryphon]

I have a GoldenGate SLC2 with the Cyrix 50MHz upgrade, Math Coprocessor, Floppy controller, 16 Mo RAM. I expanded the last two 8bit ISA port on my Amiga 2000 to make them 16 bit ISA. Then I plugged an ISA video card, a 16 bit sound card, a network card. I connected a non modified Gotek for floppy emulation, a CDROM drive, and a CF adapter. I installed Windows NT4 successfully. ISA network card and X-Surf 100 network card make Windows NT4 and Amiga OS 3.9 connected for fast file exchange using network drives.

I was not able to install Windows 95 (I tested many many many versions). It always crashed during the first reboot after the installation on C:. I wonder if this installation is possible with a different processor like the TI486SXLC 50.
Trixster, any idea ?

[nexus]

you should be able to run win95 just fine
how are you installing it and in what mode do you run the GG?

[Tryphon]

I just run digger in a Shell or digger chip.
I used disquettes version of Windows 95 and the CD version and the installation process ran normally.

The first start of Windows 95 hangs. Unfortunatly, Windows hangs during SYSCRITINIT step (in my case). According to Microsoft, no file I/O is allowed during SYSCRITINIT then the BootLog.txt file is not written until the Sys Critical Init is complete. If I understand the start process of Windows, the system.ini file is not read yet. This occurs even in safe mode (I tried digger and digger chip commands to start the Goldengate). At this stage, I do not know what to do to isolate more precisely the problem.

[nexus]

http://discussions.virtualdr.com/sho...=8087#post8087
that may help you diagnose your issue
also have you tired other version of 95?

[B2k_ad]

Since I'm not an expert in Bridgeboards I really can not give any help but since the first question was who uses Bridgeboards.... I do.
Only an XT board and only because i bought an A2000 with an ISA Hardcard in it.
But hey .... im living in BSW near the old Commodore Factory... so I needed a Bridgebord from here.
It is a Pain in the a**.
An XT Board wont run anything, DOS 2.0 does have no features, and even Bloody Word 5 won't run on it because freakin 512K of Memory aren't enough.
It should run however, maybe there is somethimg messed with my memory.
I can not understand why anybody would use a XT PC for word Processing in the mid to late 80ties... I mean even The OS 1.3 notepad is better than DOS Word.
anyway
One Day i will manage to run Kings Quest on it !

[trixster]

Originally Posted by Tryphon

I have a GoldenGate SLC2 with the Cyrix 50MHz upgrade, Math Coprocessor, Floppy controller, 16 Mo RAM. I expanded the last two 8bit ISA port on my Amiga 2000 to make them 16 bit ISA. Then I plugged an ISA video card, a 16 bit sound card, a network card. I connected a non modified Gotek for floppy emulation, a CDROM drive, and a CF adapter. I installed Windows NT4 successfully. ISA network card and X-Surf 100 network card make Windows NT4 and Amiga OS 3.9 connected for fast file exchange using network drives.

I was not able to install Windows 95 (I tested many many many versions). It always crashed during the first reboot after the installation on C:. I wonder if this installation is possible with a different processor like the TI486SXLC 50.
Trixster, any idea ?

Great setup, I’m impressed that you got all the network set up.

I wish the GoldenGate would work in a window like the Commodore cards can. You can LAmiga-Q to swap between workbench and the GG (if using a monitor master) but it would be cool to have the pc running in a workbench window.

I haven’t yet tried installing windows95. Apparently it needs to be done using floppies, not the cd. I have a new ome 22disk win 95 install to try later this month when I have some time off work.