A1200 zorro busboard....

[thinlega]

Can someone please recomend and a1200 zorro busboard to me..

i would probably prefer a small one

[RetroMan]

That depends on your needs You only want to use Amiga 2000 cards ? Then get a cheap Zorro II Busboard .... else get a Z IV one but they are more expensive

[Korodny]

If you want a busboard, the following options are available. Note that not all of them work with each A1200 tower case, specify what kind of case you're using. Some accellerators don't work with Zorro bus boards, so tell us about your accellerator too.

Zorro4 (Elbox)

This one has two "Zorro4" slots which only work with special Z4 compatible cards. In theory, these slots should give very high transfer speeds (compared to other Zorro solutions) - unfortunately, there are absolutely no Z4 cards available.

Additionally it has 5 Zorro2 slots, two of which can be switched to "Fast Zorro2" mode which is twice as fast as the original Zorro2. Unfortunately, it has a nasty bug: The first Zorro2 card is not recognised! You always have to use a "dummy" in the first slot, otherwise one of the cards you need won't be recognised. I don't know if this bug was fixed with later revisions.

It comes with four "clock port" connectors which accept expansions designed to connect to the A1200's clock port.

Finally, the board can be equipped with a video slot. It shipped for about 150 EUR initially, and I think it's somewhat rare (as PCI busboards appeared shortly after its release).

Zorro3 (Micronik)

This has five Zorro slots, an (optional) video slot and a CPU slot compatible the A3000/4000 CPU cards.

It acts as a standard Zorro2 bus board. As soon as you plug an A3000/4000 accellerator card in the onboard CPU slot, the Zorro slots turn into Zorro3 slots.

This thing was damn expansive back then. The fact that you needed to buy the bus board and an A4000 accellerator card to enable Zorro3 made it pretty useless: Soon after it hit the market, second hand A4000 computers were available for less than the cost of the Z3 board + A4000 accellerator card.

It's a high quality product though. This board shipped for about 400 EUR initially.

Zorro2 (Mikronik)

Five Zorro2 slots, optional video slot available. Very good quality. Initial price: about 170 EUR.

There was an additional Zorro2 board from RBM, but I don't know anything about it.

Zorro2 Single Slot (Eyetech?)

One Zorro2 slot (for people that just needed a gfx card and didn't want to spend a lot of money for seven Zorro slots). Pretty stupid approach. The Zorro card does not point towards the back side of the tower case (so that external connectors of the card are accessible from the outside) but to the top of the case (it's positioned parallel to the motherboard).

Not much cheaper then a full blown Mikronik Zorro2 bus board (about 130 EUR), therefore nobody bought it. Pretty rare, I guess.

Which one?

I can only recommend the Micronik Zorro2 bus boards. If you can get one second hand very cheap (30-40 EUR), buy it. Try to get a Picasso2 or a Cybervision for it. Don't try to get Zorro3, it's not worth the trouble. Get an A4000 instead.

But Zorro bus boards are yesterday's technology. Zorro cards are still much to expensive and suffer from slow transfer speeds and outdated onboard chips. Unless you already have some really good Zorro cards (e.g. a soundcard, a VLab Motion (+Movieshop) or a Picasso4), don't buy one.

Try to get a Mediator PCI bus board. May sound somewhat expensive at first (230 EUR), but it will give you standard PCI slots. Use a Soundblaster, Voodoo, S3 or Permedia2 gfx cards, cheap NICs, TV cards (watch TV on your Workbench).

[Amiga1992]

I *think* my bro wants to put the busboard in one of those eyetech rackmounts... I'm not sure tho!

[cv643d]

I think that you will never get true 100% compatibility with all zorro cards out there. Stay away from old busboards.

[Korodny]

@Akira:

I *think* my bro wants to put the busboard in one of those eyetech rackmounts... I'm not sure tho!

Huh? I don't see how this could work. For a start, the racks are probably not high enough, and the PSU is where the busbuard should be.

In this case, the Zorro2 board with just one slot would be the only option, IMHO. I just checked it, and Eyetech seem to have a limited stock of these still available:

http://www.eyetech.co.uk/search.php?...SearchCat=ALSO

@cv643d:

I think that you will never get true 100% compatibility with all zorro cards out there. Stay away from old busboards.

All boards mentioned above should work with most Zorro cards. Only DMA Zorro-cards won't work, but there are very few of those - and all of them are pretty old and useless stuff, like memory expansions on a Zorro2 card).