yeah that was really interesting.. was very odd seeing it doing a mem check on boot.. does it run the amiga in the background then? could you pull that msdos screen down to reveal the amiga working behind it? or was it literally a PC..not emulation
@@bazza5699 No multi tasking. It boots the bios of the board and takes over the video and i/o hardware. Its very odd when the KCS BIOS takes over the floppy (back when my floppy drive was working). It _sounds_ like a PC. Funny how you get used to a particular hardwares noises...
Leon Verrall : yes. Thank you, it was good to see in use. I wanted one back in the day. I always pictured it as being a pc that would multi task with the Amiga being a separate card eg drag the screen down to see and use workbench. I guess I’d have been a bit disappointed.
Thanks for watching. If you'd like to support future content then why not head over to patreon.com/retromancave to help The Cave. Thank you! Neil - RMC
I managed to get Windows running on the KCS Power PC Board. Took considerable effort as I think Windows came on HD disks and I had to copy the files onto DD disks if I remember correctly. I had to keep swapping disks when it said it couldn't find files until it found them but it installed. It was very slow, but it worked. I got vid on my channel if you are interested.
Great Video. I was in the same place in 1991, and bought the "AT Once" emulator for my A500 because it was the cheapest. Instead of the trapdoor, it used a daughterboard that replaced the factory 68000. It could run both AmigaOS and MSDOS at the same time if wanted. I ended up using that emulator all through college because the professor required everyone to use specific MSDOS applications.
I used to install these daughterboards on Amiga and Atari computers. The CPU was an 80386 and the boards were much smaller because they used the computer's memory instead of their own. If I remember correctly, they were around $100.00. We ran Windows 1.0, DR DOS 5.0, Ventura Publishing, AutoCad and they all ran as well as you would expect.
@@ct6502c It's funny that I can now relate to my great aunt who was born in 1913. She used to ride in a horse and buggy when she was a little girl. She saw the invention of FM radio, color film, television, record players, and computers. She lived just short of 100 years. I remember a time before video games didn't exist. A long distance phone call across the country cost real money. Black and white televisions were still common. My first computer had 4 kilobytes on it and I was an expert working on that system by the time I was 9. Storage was done on a cassette tape drive. I remember back in the 1980s, someday televisions would be as thing as a picture frame.. This was before LCD's and the technology they were talking about were NOT LCD's - it was a modified CRT that didn't have an electron gun - the technology is dead and you never saw it hit the market. I'm an engineer in Silicon Valley, I almost think we're done in where we can go. There will be no better displays, television and radio are obsolete, a $70 computer is as powerful as my workstation was 18 years ago, and could service my ENTIRE university back in the 1990s. You have all the information you want in front of you, you can talk to anybody in the world, you have access to over a hundred years of film and television, and radio. What's left to be done?
@@ct6502c It was called a "field emission display". The idea was to create a cloud of electrons within a vacuum - this is basically how a vacuum tube works. Then to light up a dot on the screen you would create a positive charge at that location, this would cause the electrons in the cloud to hit that spot lighting the phosphor dot. They made a few prototypes but it never made it to manufacturing. It could have competed against LCD, but it looks like LED will take that out eventually.
EGA requires more hoops to go through when writing to video memory, so that's why it was slower in both of your examples. CGA and VGA are very linear memory arrangements and easier to translate to the amiga via a straightforward chunky-to-planar conversion. (What's ironic is that EGA itself is a planar format, so it *could* have been very fast had the implementation been better.) Thanks for the review; Being a PC person, I'd always been curious how these types of adapters performed. This one seems perfectly adequate to run all software made from 1981-1990 at a respectable clip; it's just a shame the video memory implementation is sluggish.
> (What's ironic is that EGA itself is a planar format, so it could have been very fast had the implementation been better.) That's an interesting point. You should be able to pass memory writes straight through to Amiga memory and then switch banks on a port access. Mind you EGA had some funky write modes where you'd write to all the banks simultaneously which you'd need to emulate. You'd actually be better off with a card that used the some of the onboard RAM to emulate a VGA card, but then you'd need to plug your monitor into the card outputs which I don't think was possible from a card in the A500.
I think this is why on the competitor to this board that I had (ATOnce Plus) they didn't even try to implement the 16-colour mode for EGA. It only supported colour in CGA mode and left the EGA and VGA emulation as 2-colour monochrome only (along with support for Hercules, T3100, and Olivetti hi-res monochrome support). Much more sensible for the "real work" focus and no disappointing super-slow EGA colour mode.
Mode 13h on VGA was linear, but plenty of VGA modes were planar as well. VGA had the official "modes" included in the BIOS, but they were just settings for the onboard chips. Software could create wildly varing modes by taking charge of the settings itself, though your monitor wasn't guaranteed to actually show them. There were quite a few hacked modes for VGA, Mode X being a popular one, I think Doom used that.
I started my PC career on a Amiga 1200 with the Vortex PC-AT-once. Also a hardware solution, but then for the 1200. You had to put it on the processor socket and place the processor on the PC board. This was a 286 PC. That was literally my first MS-DOS PC! It ran like a charm!
Mine worked great, but one odd issue was that when it did crash, all the error messages were in german! I used my ATOnce right up until 1998. It wasnt until all my friends got obsessed with "Half-life" that I was coerced into getting a "real PC". lol
Interesting kit, I recall my school started fitting similar in the slice risc pc's they had filled the IT lab with when they probably realised that Acorn wasnt the future :D
I bought something like this back in the day for my A500 in an attempt to avoid replacing it with a PC. Didn't really work out and Doom put the final nail in the coffin. I think Commodore missed an opportunity for making add-in cards for PCs to allow Amiga software to run on them.
I once had a Gravis Ultrasound. It had the same delicious red colour, maybe this card is from around the same era? Nowadays you get almost any colour card you can think of.
I had a mate who back in 1990 replaced his Amiga 500 system which included a genlock with a 386 VGA PC minus a sound card. He seemed quite pleased, I wasn't too impressed.
Would there have been enough room in the big box machines for PC and Mac functionality at the same time? A Commodore PC Macintosh would've been the ultimate machine! Like that audio track at the end there.
John Knight : you could run MacOS emulator on the Amiga. It runs faster than a real Mac so yes this was/is indeed possible. There is a RUclips video demonstrating. I don’t have the link to hand I’m afraid.
Yes, absolutely you could. The ideal solution would be a fast 386 or 486 bridgeboard for the PC side of things in one slot and an Emplant Card to cover the Mac side of things. Stuff both of those into an A2000 with an accelerator and hard drive (or better) and you'd have the ultimate do-everything machine. amiga.resource.cx/exp/emplant
I love these videos featuring rare hardware for old computers. I hope you can, indeed, make more content on the subject of emulation on the Amiga (or other computers), since it is a very interesting topic. Really great work.
It would have made a lot of sense in the late 80s when MSDOS text mode applications were all anybody ran on the PC, but in 1992 Windows 3 was beginning to take off for applications, and for games you were looking at a 386 with genuine VGA graphics or better. Still for the price being able to run Wordperfect was probably a big selling point.
Although, WordPerfect did have an Amiga version of their word processor on the market, back then. I even think Lotus 1-2-3 was available for the Amiga. Now, running Microsoft Word 5.5 for DOS on an Amiga would have been pretty cool or even Geoworks Ensemble 😎 I wonder how Autocad 2.6 would perform on this pc card?
In 1993 I had an 80386 PC which wasn't very fast (16MHz) but did the job. A housemate offered me an A500 for cheap and all my friends had one so I thought: Why not. I also got one of these KCS boards so this brought back some memories. I didn't like the KCS Power PC at all really, I'm glad I didn't pay full price for it. I was very disappointed that it was an all-or-nothing piece of hardware: it either ran as a PC or as Amiga, not both at the same time, and that was a major problem. All my fun PC stuff was on the hard disk in my PC and copying it to floppy just to use it on an Amiga pretending to be a PC was just too much of a hassle. I did have a hard disk on my Amiga (ironically that was a PC hard disk connected to a Western Digital MFM controller for a PC which was attached to the Amiga via an "ALF" (Amiga Loads Faster) interface. But of course that didn't work while the KCS board was pretending that the Amiga was a PC. On top of that, I had an apparent problem with the memory on the KCS board, so I took it out and used another memory expansion board.
for some reason I was hoping to see commander keen there. Great episode I always wanted an Amiga when I was a kid, seeing this episodes scratches a very particular itch
I really missed this piece of hardware back in the early 90s , cause PCs were considered as pure business machines in that period. 3 years later, i switched sides buying a 486 dx33 my firts pc at system yet without cd rom...
Cool stuff, never had a KCS Powerboard. I guess they couldn't expand its performance due to the space restrictions of the trapdoor slot, but a clever use of that expansion slot. I did eventually have a GoldenGate 386SX Bridgeboard in my Amiga 3000, pretty much exactly as you described, running with an ISA graphics card, I don't recall having a soundcard for it but perhaps. But it ran just great, and Windows 3.1 and MS Office as well as other apps worked fine on it. The other bonus was it could multitask with Amiga Workbench available at all times.
I always wondered about this card, but never was able to buy one. A few years back, I got an Amiga 500+ WITH this KCS Power-PC Board... finally, although it didn't come with the needed software. I haven't tried to use it since... and now I even reside in a different place, far away from that machine. So, you couldn't imagine how this makes me feel. an actual FINALLY! Thanks!
I had a Mac G3 that had a PC on a board. It worked pretty good as I recall. I've had a lot of old computers and collected them for awhile. I exited the hobby as I ran out of space to store them and they take time to run and maintain. And, the fun was getting them, learning about them, in some cases restoring them or collecting peripherals. But after that fun was expired I be left with the storage issue. Sold many off.
I used a purely software emulation on my Amiga 1200, namely “PC Task” so I could run Turbo Pascal for DOS to do my uni coursework! 😄 I did also run Shapeshifter to emulate a Mac, helped along by having an 030@50Mhz card in my Miggy 👍
Had the 386sx bridgeboard in my A4000, which also allowed for ISA cards including video and sound so you got full speed without dragging down the amiga's own native resources. Quite remarkable having that much power under one hood.
Oh, I am exploring games now for the Amige with WinUAE. The Lemmings sequels are really fun. The DOS versions of them are below the Amiga ones in terms of graphics, sound and controls.
Cool to see the NEC V series CPU in something Amiga related. Sega used the V60 in their Model 1 arcade boards (Virtua Fighter, Virtua Racing, Wing War) and a 68000 for the sound board in those games.
Hi Neil. Coincidentally I picked up an A500 last week. Inside was a KCS power pc board. Unfortunately no disks came with it. This video helps me how to find out to make it to work. So thank you for that!
Great one! I used to have an ATOnce card myself..this one seemed a bit more functional then the one I had. I always found the fact that Amiga could become other computers a real bragging point back in the day. No matter how slow World Class Leaderboard Golf looked on your Amiga, it ran a helluva lot better then your buddy trying to run an Amiga disk on his PC!
I used to use my Mum's PC to continuously browse Aminet for software for my Amiga back in the 90's. I absolutely loved my Amiga. 😀😀😀. (A500+, 4MG of memory and a HD8+ 60MB Hard drive extension. x. I remember also being able to read PC disks with my Amiga too.
Really enjoyed this video Neil, thanks. Interesting comment about how much these boards cost compared to the price of an actual PC! But I agree, when it comes to games, I would choose the miggy over the earlier PC stuff every time!
I vaguely remember doing this with a software emulator and a DOS boot disk, to run COMAL at home on an A600, and that was dreadfully slow, but just about workable. I want to say it was maybe using a shareware version of PC Task or something of that order.
An Intel in a Amiga? Blasphemy! ... Now, gimme that card! :D ... I remember reading about this card in the magazines back in the days, drooling all over the pictures. That's one amazing card you got there, RMC! KCS produced an amazing '030 turbo card for the A500 as well, BTW.
I am sure that you already spotted it, but the capacitor near the connector is going to need to be replaced asap. The one right at the edge of the board. It looks to be power smoothing cap, it may cause issues later on, if not replaced. Thanks for the video btw. Most enjoyable.
I had (still have) a 286 board for the GVP hard drive. I used it whilst at college for running stuff like OrCAD, for designing electronic circuits. Worked OK.
Considering I like Commodore about as much as, hmm, errr,, well, I actually liked this ?Commodore video. As an Atari fan I really liked how the Amiga 500 had so much expansion, and this board seemed pretty good value especially if you needed to get a RAM upgrade. Now I need to hunt down the 286 emulator for my Falcon, or secret A1200 I pretend I do not have. LOL
CGA was quite colourful but most used the RGB output that gives you them dreadful colours and so many users didn’t know about how colourful it could be as most only had the RGB output to a SVGA monitor. The 8-Bit Guy did a great video on explaining it in detail
I had the KCS board it was great I used it for MS Word, Multiplan, and Data Base Plus, it ran them perfectly In fact I still have them in my airing cupboard.
This board is nice and I really, really, really wish I could find one for my Amiga 500. That magazine also showed a 386SX bridgeboard card. Now one of those in a big box Amiga would be a nice retrosystem, I'm sure.
I remember these boards being primarily for using the business applications like wordstar, 123, etc. that you couldn’t run on your Amiga. For games it was all Amiga versions as they were far better. VGA finally closed the graphics gap while adlib closed the audio gap but they required at least a 286 for those early games
Nice one, hadn't heard of that before. I remember there was software you could get that could let the Amiga read PC disks - that was invaluable as I did my college essays on my Amiga and saved them to be printed at the Uni.
In the magazine scan image that comes up at 12:04, I had the top item. That is, the hard drive with an IBM PC compatible board inside. It was a 286 CPU running at 16MHz if I remember correctly. I don't think I used it for much other than trying PC Out Run though, as it all came as part of a second hand bundle and I didn't need it. And Amiga Out Run was still better. The hard drive expansion also allowed for more RAM (I added 4Mbytes) and SCSI add-ons. I should still have it. But, it's probably filled with spiders.
I built a 16mhz 2mb 286 with VGA in 1991 when I was fifteen for about 1000 dollars including the monitor. It was fast and looked great. Mowed a lot of lawns for that... I considered buying an Amiga 500 but was confused and concerned that the US retailers had almost no software for it.
Awesome:) The keyboard fits too as it looks very MS-DOS-like. What's interesting, you can have a mini version of this. I use my The A500 Mini as a DOS machine (Pandory mod). It's not quite the same, but still.
EGA is a pretty complicated graphics card to emulate, with multiple bitplanes and such. If this is not done using hardware, it's no wonder it was very slow. VGA, especially the MCGA mode 13 on the other hand is extremely simple and that might explain the better performance in Prince. For Sound Blaster you need to set the BLASTER environment variable. E.g. 'SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1' for port 220, IRQ 5 and DMA 1 in your autoexec.bat. Also, you should try Space Quest 3 or King's 4, which can run from floppy, support EGA and MCGA modes and AdLib sound cards. Not sure though if the emulator only emulates the DSP part of the Sound Blaster or the AdLib as well, which is much harder without a YM3812.
5 лет назад+2
Nice video, and very interesting, thanks for that! I'm not surprised EGA is the slowest .... It uses bit planes and multiple modes of the access of the so called "colour-bytes" from the view of the CPU with other oddities, while VGA 320*200 (also called MCGA) is kinda regular, etc (do not mention X-Mode now and other non-standard VGA tricks). Sounds strange since Amiga also knows about bit planes etc etc, but as far as I can guess (I'm not so much familiar with Amiga, unfortunately) quite different method to access the bit planes (AFAIK Amiga can access all bit planes directly, while EGA needs that multiple-mode tricky colour byte theory ....). So in fact, in EGA emulation, I can imagine it's horrible slow to bridge the differences ... I'm even surprised it comes out this fast!
I wouldn't call that card an emulator. Technically, it is an entire PC minus the I/O part (sound, video, input). I guess the word "emulation" was used here more as a marketing than a technical term.
I'm guessing it's technically an emulator in that while code executes natively on the x86, the 68000 is emulating other parts of the system like the display adapter and floppy controller.
Its what was referred to back in those days as "hardware emulation", as opposed to software emulation. For older but similar examples see the various "Z-80 cards" for the Apple II or the CP/M cartridge for the Commodore 64.
I actually had one of these. My school had computer science courses and they only did Turbo Pascal. Could not afford a complete PC so I bought one of these. It was slow as hell, but it ran Turbo Pascal fast enough to get my courses done.
VGA is an easier mode in general because its pretty much just a regular, 256 color bitmap, while ega use all sort of non-planar bit manipulation wackery.
Is it possible the VGA is running in the actual VGA monochrome mode (yes, there was such a thing) and thus not having to shift as much memory around as the EGA colour one? As for PCs, I also bought one in 1993 to replace my Amiga 1200, but it was a 40MHz 386SX costing around £500--couldn't afford high-end gear like a 486!
hmmh. 1993 is about the time we got our second PC. Cost $2300 Australian dollars. 486 SX 25 mhz with (early) SVGA, a Pro Audio Spectrum 16 and a 2x CD-ROM drive. (I forget the other specifications), ran dos 6.21 and windows 3.11 Those early SVGA cards topped out at something like 800x600, primarily due to lack of VRAM, but it was still pretty solid. (the only old PC components I still have, though I wish I had kept more, since I got rid of a bunch around 2000ish is a two floppy drives, and a 2 megabyte SVGA card - though not the one from this original 486) Of course, we had owned a PC already as early as 1990, which was a 286 (but that's all I know about it and what kind of specs it had. My guess is it was about 16 mhz with EGA graphics but running to a monochrome monitor.)
I bought the same, it was even the same price, but mine was to replace my 500, was going to get a 1200 with a 120mb hd and the pc was the same price, a year later it became a 486/66 just by replacing the motherboard and cpu. So all in all it was a little over £700 for a 4mb dx2 66.
Many years ago I had a pc dos emulator on my Amiga 1200. I managed to get it running the Seetrax DOS Ranger circuit and pcb cad design. It was very slow and took an age to pan across a page but it did work. It was too slow to use it for anything serious but good to see my Amiga able to do it
Surely not. It's only a touch slow on an Amstrad 1640 with NECV30 in EGA,. and fine in CGA, and that's only 8mhz. A 20mhz 286 should handle POP with ease... unless the EGA chipset is *incredibly* bad, I suppose.
@@TheTurnipKing It was a cheap homebrew using the type of collection of parts you get by a college student working on spare change with parts catalogs. EVERYTHING on it was incredibly bad, right down to the fact that hard disks were still quite out of my price range, and the case was cardboard. But yes, something was very strange with Prince of Persia and certain implementations of the EGA chipset.
Theodore. Your cardboard case story reminds me of a friend at college who bought a £99 colour monitor for his BBC Computer. Sure it worked fine but for £99 all he got was a chassis originally designed for an Arcade machine and he had to make his own case out of chipboard :-)
Yeah I remember weighing these options back in the day. Just hanging out with my buddy that had just upgraded to a 486 was enough for me to appreciate DOS gaming, but having the Amiga was what made it so special anyway. I eventually got a Packard Bell Pentium when my Amiga finally crapped out and the Lisa chip melted lol. I think Amiga users were the original hipsters...
I wasn't aware you could even run something like this from the trapdoor slot. Very interesting video. Still, it's not a good enough excuse to not also have a retro PC build :-D
That would never work as the RAM/support chips would be too slow, and the Amiga 500's CPU is too slow to emulate all the missing PC hardware in software (graphics/sounds etc...) at that speed... You're better off putting a RISC chip in an amiga and using DOSBOX or equiv emulators...
What a fascinating little board. I have a similar board (could be the same? Not sure, as it came without the box) for my A2000, and I always found it to be a neat little oddity
Thank you for a look at a card that I nearly got for myself. I was young and foolish and instead saved up for an Amstard DX4 100 a few years later. Oh the disapointment even though it turned out that the Amstard was a really good PC, it's just that PCs where running at 100 mhz running windows 3.1 were still outclassed by an amiga running at 7.
I think the Amiga 500 was more the equivalent to a very low end 386 like a SX25 or maybe even a very high end 286. It had nothing on a 486...Especially a 100MHz 486. That machine would have ran Doom, quake, Duke nukem 3d, bloody hell I bet it would have a good go at Tomb Raider or Resident Evil and there's no way those games would run on an Amiga 500.
Thanks Richard. I jumped from an A500 to a 486 SX33 and remember enjoying the games and CDROM drive (the A570 CDROM on my Amiga had very few titles to run) but Windows felt like a big downgrade. I then put a DX4 100 in it and some extra RAM. Windows was still...Windows...but that thing flew compared to the old A500. I'm afraid I wasn't looking back at that stage.
Yeah, a DX4/100 is about as fast as a 50MHz 68040, give or take. Though an Amiga with a fast 040 would have been a nicer experience than a PC with Windows. Compared to, say, OS/2 or NeXTSTEP, maybe not - but the Amiga would have handily won for games!
Lassi Kinnunen : I got mine around March or April ish 1994; Windows 95 was not out, I was stuck with the supplied DOS and Windows 3.1. This used cooperative multitasking whereas the Amiga had true preemptive multitasking, also the hardware with the custom chips performing separate tasks independently such as disk io, mouse functions etc and the os being highly efficient and written for the hardware was far more effective. Basically I had to buy additional ram and a better graphics card and windows 95 a year later for it to be comparable (to me). Thankfully yes I did have doom and later duke nukem 3D to sweeten the deal. I did however use my computer for far more than gaming.
You have to be careful comparing the OS experience of Amiga to PC OS of the time. Of course the Amiga wins there. But in terms of raw processing power it was beat quickly by the competition. Also a lot of Amiga programmers had a leg up in terms of optimization for a bit.
It doesn’t surprise me that Prince of Persia EGA ran slower than VGA; EGA was much more complex to program for and difficult to optimize, whereas VGA just provided a flat framebuffer and was even easier than CGA (but CGA had way less memory to move around so its performance generally wins out overall).
You are actually getting AT class speeds. The V30 is a 16 bit data bus chip, like the 68000. The IBM PC was 16 bits inside the CPU but 8 bits everywhere else. The 8-bit data bus made using parts for earlier generation ( 8080/8085) PC s easier. The V20/ V30 also had an 8080 compatible mode inside. They could run CPM-80 applications under MSdos. I wonnder how data files could be moved between Amiga and PC modes.Thanks for more odd and historic computer stuff. It is always a pleasure!
there was software I remember using , share or free ware that could run ibm exe files - also was fun porting stuff over serial from amiga A500 to/from friends atariST and running it
I'm surprised it doesn't support CGA's composite mode, since it's being output over composite! (Or, now that I think about it, I don't know if CGA composite worked right on PAL...) The golf game is definitely meant to be run in CGA composite, not Cyan/Magenta/White digital mode.
Honestly, when it came to gaming, Amiga was the undisputed king, but in terms of non-game software, IBM compatibles were the absolute reigning masters of the computer world, with the Macintosh coming in at second.
There was much more variety than you imply in the early 1990s. At work the engineers used PCs, Unix workstations like Sun, and the Vax mainframe, while the managers had Macs as Executive status symbols. At home friends and colleagues had an equal variety of computers, with low end PCs, and Amigas. I had the absolute reigning master of music sequencing at the time, an Atari ST, while one of the managers I mentioned was a huge fan of the Acorn Archimedes, only reluctantly switching to a Mac at home many years later.
The Acorn Archimedes was a great computer! My dad used to have one for a biology research lab he had been working at up until around 1995 I think. It was really underrated at the time and should have been more popular in my opinion. It barely had any games made for it, but the Archimedes found its way into professional use, mainly among scientists I believe. The Archimedes was also historically important as it was the very first ARM computer and was extremely efficient at pushing out integer calculations very quickly.
I had this card in my Amiga 500 back in 93 I think. They had a tradein for your old memory expansion, and with that is was the same price as a 512K expansion. For games it was pretty useless. Slow for one, when going any further than cga. And as I didn't have a harddrive, even slower... What I did use it for extensively though is programming in what was called PowerBasic, and I had a blast writing pc software on my Amiga. Great times, when computers had a charm of their own. Shame I sold it with my A500 when that broke and I moved on to a real pc. Would love to still have that piece of history in the attick...
The problem with the KCS board was that by the time it was released in 1991 an XT PC was already terribly out of date. A 386 was pretty much required to run most modern software and by early 1993 a 486 was absolutely mandatory. As you say, adding all these emulation boards to a suitably souped up Amiga was usually more expensive than buying a standalone PC, and not as good. A major problem with the A500 was of course interlace flicker. Many modes used for business software would be absolutely impossible to endure on a normal Amiga. Add the cost of a flicker fixer and you're way beyond what a PC costs.
Nice one. Hope everyone enjoys seeing this little oddity. Better than it sitting in my loft for the rest of time.
Thanks for sharing it with us 😀
yeah that was really interesting.. was very odd seeing it doing a mem check on boot.. does it run the amiga in the background then? could you pull that msdos screen down to reveal the amiga working behind it? or was it literally a PC..not emulation
@@bazza5699 No multi tasking. It boots the bios of the board and takes over the video and i/o hardware. Its very odd when the KCS BIOS takes over the floppy (back when my floppy drive was working). It _sounds_ like a PC. Funny how you get used to a particular hardwares noises...
Leon Verrall : yes. Thank you, it was good to see in use. I wanted one back in the day. I always pictured it as being a pc that would multi task with the Amiga being a separate card eg drag the screen down to see and use workbench. I guess I’d have been a bit disappointed.
You are a gentleman and a scholar. Thanks for allowing us to see this.
DOS on Amiga... human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!
Meow 😥😮
:V
Hahaha, no MS-DOS is human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!
@Jip Jackson windows me is where my godly patience is comming from
@Jip Jackson ah yes, the bluescreen the most screamed at screen there is
Thanks for watching. If you'd like to support future content then why not head over to patreon.com/retromancave to help The Cave. Thank you! Neil - RMC
I managed to get Windows running on the KCS Power PC Board. Took considerable effort as I think Windows came on HD disks and I had to copy the files onto DD disks if I remember correctly. I had to keep swapping disks when it said it couldn't find files until it found them but it installed. It was very slow, but it worked. I got vid on my channel if you are interested.
Blasphemer, get the pitch forks lads.
Those cards sure were everywhere in the mags back in the day. Awesome to finally see one in action!
Great Video. I was in the same place in 1991, and bought the "AT Once" emulator for my A500 because it was the cheapest. Instead of the trapdoor, it used a daughterboard that replaced the factory 68000. It could run both AmigaOS and MSDOS at the same time if wanted. I ended up using that emulator all through college because the professor required everyone to use specific MSDOS applications.
Me too! See my response above!
I guess I was lucky, all work was done on Unix and Vax/VMS when I was in college in the early 1990s.
I used to install these daughterboards on Amiga and Atari computers. The CPU was an 80386 and the boards were much smaller because they used the computer's memory instead of their own. If I remember correctly, they were around $100.00. We ran Windows 1.0, DR DOS 5.0, Ventura Publishing, AutoCad and they all ran as well as you would expect.
@@ct6502c It's funny that I can now relate to my great aunt who was born in 1913. She used to ride in a horse and buggy when she was a little girl. She saw the invention of FM radio, color film, television, record players, and computers. She lived just short of 100 years.
I remember a time before video games didn't exist. A long distance phone call across the country cost real money. Black and white televisions were still common. My first computer had 4 kilobytes on it and I was an expert working on that system by the time I was 9. Storage was done on a cassette tape drive.
I remember back in the 1980s, someday televisions would be as thing as a picture frame.. This was before LCD's and the technology they were talking about were NOT LCD's - it was a modified CRT that didn't have an electron gun - the technology is dead and you never saw it hit the market.
I'm an engineer in Silicon Valley, I almost think we're done in where we can go. There will be no better displays, television and radio are obsolete, a $70 computer is as powerful as my workstation was 18 years ago, and could service my ENTIRE university back in the 1990s.
You have all the information you want in front of you, you can talk to anybody in the world, you have access to over a hundred years of film and television, and radio. What's left to be done?
@@ct6502c It was called a "field emission display".
The idea was to create a cloud of electrons within a vacuum - this is basically how a vacuum tube works.
Then to light up a dot on the screen you would create a positive charge at that location, this would cause the electrons in the cloud to hit that spot lighting the phosphor dot.
They made a few prototypes but it never made it to manufacturing. It could have competed against LCD, but it looks like LED will take that out eventually.
EGA requires more hoops to go through when writing to video memory, so that's why it was slower in both of your examples. CGA and VGA are very linear memory arrangements and easier to translate to the amiga via a straightforward chunky-to-planar conversion. (What's ironic is that EGA itself is a planar format, so it *could* have been very fast had the implementation been better.)
Thanks for the review; Being a PC person, I'd always been curious how these types of adapters performed. This one seems perfectly adequate to run all software made from 1981-1990 at a respectable clip; it's just a shame the video memory implementation is sluggish.
> (What's ironic is that EGA itself is a planar format, so it could have been very fast had the implementation been better.)
That's an interesting point. You should be able to pass memory writes straight through to Amiga memory and then switch banks on a port access.
Mind you EGA had some funky write modes where you'd write to all the banks simultaneously which you'd need to emulate. You'd actually be better off with a card that used the some of the onboard RAM to emulate a VGA card, but then you'd need to plug your monitor into the card outputs which I don't think was possible from a card in the A500.
I think this is why on the competitor to this board that I had (ATOnce Plus) they didn't even try to implement the 16-colour mode for EGA. It only supported colour in CGA mode and left the EGA and VGA emulation as 2-colour monochrome only (along with support for Hercules, T3100, and Olivetti hi-res monochrome support). Much more sensible for the "real work" focus and no disappointing super-slow EGA colour mode.
I'm impressed it could do EGA at all to be honest given the hardware.
Mode 13h on VGA was linear, but plenty of VGA modes were planar as well. VGA had the official "modes" included in the BIOS, but they were just settings for the onboard chips. Software could create wildly varing modes by taking charge of the settings itself, though your monitor wasn't guaranteed to actually show them. There were quite a few hacked modes for VGA, Mode X being a popular one, I think Doom used that.
Really impressive how much stuff they could rout through the regular Amiga IO and disk drive
I started my PC career on a Amiga 1200 with the Vortex PC-AT-once. Also a hardware solution, but then for the 1200. You had to put it on the processor socket and place the processor on the PC board. This was a 286 PC. That was literally my first MS-DOS PC! It ran like a charm!
Mine worked great, but one odd issue was that when it did crash, all the error messages were in german! I used my ATOnce right up until 1998. It wasnt until all my friends got obsessed with "Half-life" that I was coerced into getting a "real PC". lol
I had one for my Amiga 500, but it crashed all the time. It was more of a novelty, didn't use it much.
Interesting kit, I recall my school started fitting similar in the slice risc pc's they had filled the IT lab with when they probably realised that Acorn wasnt the future :D
Ah yes! There is a RiscPC episode on the channel in which we install a 586 card. Very cool machines
I bought something like this back in the day for my A500 in an attempt to avoid replacing it with a PC. Didn't really work out and Doom put the final nail in the coffin. I think Commodore missed an opportunity for making add-in cards for PCs to allow Amiga software to run on them.
I love the red color of the board. So much better looking than a green board.
I once had a Gravis Ultrasound. It had the same delicious red colour, maybe this card is from around the same era? Nowadays you get almost any colour card you can think of.
I had a mate who back in 1990 replaced his Amiga 500 system which included a genlock with a 386 VGA PC minus a sound card. He seemed quite pleased, I wasn't too impressed.
Would there have been enough room in the big box machines for PC and Mac functionality at the same time? A Commodore PC Macintosh would've been the ultimate machine!
Like that audio track at the end there.
John Knight : you could run MacOS emulator on the Amiga. It runs faster than a real Mac so yes this was/is indeed possible. There is a RUclips video demonstrating. I don’t have the link to hand I’m afraid.
Found it. ruclips.net/video/Jph0gxzL3UI/видео.html
A really handsome and knowledgable presenter as well. ;-)
Yes, absolutely you could. The ideal solution would be a fast 386 or 486 bridgeboard for the PC side of things in one slot and an Emplant Card to cover the Mac side of things. Stuff both of those into an A2000 with an accelerator and hard drive (or better) and you'd have the ultimate do-everything machine.
amiga.resource.cx/exp/emplant
I love these videos featuring rare hardware for old computers. I hope you can, indeed, make more content on the subject of emulation on the Amiga (or other computers), since it is a very interesting topic. Really great work.
It would have made a lot of sense in the late 80s when MSDOS text mode applications were all anybody ran on the PC, but in 1992 Windows 3 was beginning to take off for applications, and for games you were looking at a 386 with genuine VGA graphics or better. Still for the price being able to run Wordperfect was probably a big selling point.
Although, WordPerfect did have an Amiga version of their word processor on the market, back then. I even think Lotus 1-2-3 was available for the Amiga. Now, running Microsoft Word 5.5 for DOS on an Amiga would have been pretty cool or even Geoworks Ensemble 😎 I wonder how Autocad 2.6 would perform on this pc card?
Such a cool device. I only had IBM PCs growing up so if I had an Amiga, this card would be a must have.
In 1993 I had an 80386 PC which wasn't very fast (16MHz) but did the job. A housemate offered me an A500 for cheap and all my friends had one so I thought: Why not. I also got one of these KCS boards so this brought back some memories.
I didn't like the KCS Power PC at all really, I'm glad I didn't pay full price for it. I was very disappointed that it was an all-or-nothing piece of hardware: it either ran as a PC or as Amiga, not both at the same time, and that was a major problem. All my fun PC stuff was on the hard disk in my PC and copying it to floppy just to use it on an Amiga pretending to be a PC was just too much of a hassle. I did have a hard disk on my Amiga (ironically that was a PC hard disk connected to a Western Digital MFM controller for a PC which was attached to the Amiga via an "ALF" (Amiga Loads Faster) interface. But of course that didn't work while the KCS board was pretending that the Amiga was a PC.
On top of that, I had an apparent problem with the memory on the KCS board, so I took it out and used another memory expansion board.
for some reason I was hoping to see commander keen there. Great episode I always wanted an Amiga when I was a kid, seeing this episodes scratches a very particular itch
In theory that would work, it WILL run on an 8086 with just a little bit of slowdown when loading.
I really missed this piece of hardware back in the early 90s , cause PCs were considered as pure business machines in that period. 3 years later, i switched sides buying a 486 dx33 my firts pc at system yet without cd rom...
Cool stuff, never had a KCS Powerboard. I guess they couldn't expand its performance due to the space restrictions of the trapdoor slot, but a clever use of that expansion slot. I did eventually have a GoldenGate 386SX Bridgeboard in my Amiga 3000, pretty much exactly as you described, running with an ISA graphics card, I don't recall having a soundcard for it but perhaps. But it ran just great, and Windows 3.1 and MS Office as well as other apps worked fine on it. The other bonus was it could multitask with Amiga Workbench available at all times.
I always wondered about this card, but never was able to buy one. A few years back, I got an Amiga 500+ WITH this KCS Power-PC Board... finally, although it didn't come with the needed software. I haven't tried to use it since... and now I even reside in a different place, far away from that machine. So, you couldn't imagine how this makes me feel. an actual FINALLY! Thanks!
I had a Mac G3 that had a PC on a board. It worked pretty good as I recall. I've had a lot of old computers and collected them for awhile. I exited the hobby as I ran out of space to store them and they take time to run and maintain. And, the fun was getting them, learning about them, in some cases restoring them or collecting peripherals. But after that fun was expired I be left with the storage issue. Sold many off.
PC Emulation on the Amiga started with the Amiga 1060 "Sidecar" for the A1000.. It was like plugging a whole PC in the side of the Amiga.
In principle, this appears to be plugging a whole PC into the trapdoor slot, minus any provision for adding cards to the isa bus.
I used a purely software emulation on my Amiga 1200, namely “PC Task” so I could run Turbo Pascal for DOS to do my uni coursework! 😄
I did also run Shapeshifter to emulate a Mac, helped along by having an 030@50Mhz card in my Miggy 👍
PC Task ran on a standard A500 aswell... but slow. Arcade Volleyball was slooow but still enjoyable.
Jörgen Pryss I ran “Cool Crocodile Twins” on it 😄
@@kanalnamn PC Task 3.1 can still run on 68000 CPU.
Had the 386sx bridgeboard in my A4000, which also allowed for ISA cards including video and sound so you got full speed without dragging down the amiga's own native resources. Quite remarkable having that much power under one hood.
Oh, I am exploring games now for the Amige with WinUAE. The Lemmings sequels are really fun. The DOS versions of them are below the Amiga ones in terms of graphics, sound and controls.
Cool to see the NEC V series CPU in something Amiga related. Sega used the V60 in their Model 1 arcade boards (Virtua Fighter, Virtua Racing, Wing War) and a 68000 for the sound board in those games.
"Looks like he hit the tree Jim" will be burned into my brain from World Class leaderboard for life lol
I remember the ads for this. Always thought it was a scam back in the day - glad to see it’s real. Thanks for taking us back in time!
Hi Neil. Coincidentally I picked up an A500 last week. Inside was a KCS power pc board. Unfortunately no disks came with it. This video helps me how to find out to make it to work. So thank you for that!
Great one! I used to have an ATOnce card myself..this one seemed a bit more functional then the one I had. I always found the fact that Amiga could become other computers a real bragging point back in the day. No matter how slow World Class Leaderboard Golf looked on your Amiga, it ran a helluva lot better then your buddy trying to run an Amiga disk on his PC!
For some strange reason my dad back then preferred the PC versions of the SSI gold box games and played those with his bridge-board in his A2000.
I used to use my Mum's PC to continuously browse Aminet for software for my Amiga back in the 90's. I absolutely loved my Amiga. 😀😀😀. (A500+, 4MG of memory and a HD8+ 60MB Hard drive extension. x. I remember also being able to read PC disks with my Amiga too.
Yeah I did the same downloading tapes for my ZX Spectrum.
I bought one of these when it came out. Loved it, as I could now 'work from home'
Really enjoyed this video Neil, thanks.
Interesting comment about how much these boards cost compared to the price of an actual PC! But I agree, when it comes to games, I would choose the miggy over the earlier PC stuff every time!
Stuff like this is always really cool.Thanks for the video!
You're welcome, thanks for taking the time to watch
I vaguely remember doing this with a software emulator and a DOS boot disk, to run COMAL at home on an A600, and that was dreadfully slow, but just about workable.
I want to say it was maybe using a shareware version of PC Task or something of that order.
Great episode, love to see some of that lesser known hardware for the Amiga
An Intel in a Amiga? Blasphemy! ... Now, gimme that card! :D ... I remember reading about this card in the magazines back in the days, drooling all over the pictures. That's one amazing card you got there, RMC! KCS produced an amazing '030 turbo card for the A500 as well, BTW.
I am sure that you already spotted it, but the capacitor near the connector is going to need to be replaced asap. The one right at the edge of the board.
It looks to be power smoothing cap, it may cause issues later on, if not replaced.
Thanks for the video btw. Most enjoyable.
Thanks Andrew that will certainly get swapped out as well as that nasty battery. Glad you enjoyed the video
@@RMCRetro Always love your videos. Great work as always. :)
I had (still have) a 286 board for the GVP hard drive. I used it whilst at college for running stuff like OrCAD, for designing electronic circuits. Worked OK.
Considering I like Commodore about as much as, hmm, errr,, well, I actually liked this ?Commodore video. As an Atari fan I really liked how the Amiga 500 had so much expansion, and this board seemed pretty good value especially if you needed to get a RAM upgrade. Now I need to hunt down the 286 emulator for my Falcon, or secret A1200 I pretend I do not have. LOL
These old PC board solutions using the Amiga no different than an internal parasite; how amazing.
CGA was quite colourful but most used the RGB output that gives you them dreadful colours and so many users didn’t know about how colourful it could be as most only had the RGB output to a SVGA monitor. The 8-Bit Guy did a great video on explaining it in detail
I had the KCS board it was great I used it for MS Word, Multiplan, and Data Base Plus, it ran them perfectly In fact I still have them in my airing cupboard.
This board is nice and I really, really, really wish I could find one for my Amiga 500.
That magazine also showed a 386SX bridgeboard card. Now one of those in a big box Amiga would be a nice retrosystem, I'm sure.
love this video! Very well made... And the KCS PC Board is amazing to see.. Used to want it, but had no money for it since i was a child then :D
I remember these boards being primarily for using the business applications like wordstar, 123, etc. that you couldn’t run on your Amiga. For games it was all Amiga versions as they were far better. VGA finally closed the graphics gap while adlib closed the audio gap but they required at least a 286 for those early games
the first thing i would have done is prompt $p$g
Nice one, hadn't heard of that before. I remember there was software you could get that could let the Amiga read PC disks - that was invaluable as I did my college essays on my Amiga and saved them to be printed at the Uni.
I have one of those in my 500, but I’ve never used the PC side of it, just the additional memory it brings.I think I have the version 1.
In the magazine scan image that comes up at 12:04, I had the top item. That is, the hard drive with an IBM PC compatible board inside. It was a 286 CPU running at 16MHz if I remember correctly. I don't think I used it for much other than trying PC Out Run though, as it all came as part of a second hand bundle and I didn't need it. And Amiga Out Run was still better. The hard drive expansion also allowed for more RAM (I added 4Mbytes) and SCSI add-ons.
I should still have it. But, it's probably filled with spiders.
cool. I remember you could format 5" floppy disks within workbench 1.3 to the PC File format
That would be 3 and a half inch low density floppies. I used that method to convert images and text files to PC readable formats. Happy days.
Red pcb looks so satisfying....
I built a 16mhz 2mb 286 with VGA in 1991 when I was fifteen for about 1000 dollars including the monitor. It was fast and looked great. Mowed a lot of lawns for that... I considered buying an Amiga 500 but was confused and concerned that the US retailers had almost no software for it.
Nice. I remember seeing a PC board for the Amiga in a mag back in the day. That one had a 386sx cpu on it, though
Had that one on my a2000
i had the bbc micro emulator for the 500. good to see it again! great video as always!
I remember lusting after these, couldn't afford them of course - the most I could afford was a secondary floppy drive - cumana :-)
Awesome:) The keyboard fits too as it looks very MS-DOS-like. What's interesting, you can have a mini version of this. I use my The A500 Mini as a DOS machine (Pandory mod). It's not quite the same, but still.
EGA is a pretty complicated graphics card to emulate, with multiple bitplanes and such. If this is not done using hardware, it's no wonder it was very slow. VGA, especially the MCGA mode 13 on the other hand is extremely simple and that might explain the better performance in Prince. For Sound Blaster you need to set the BLASTER environment variable. E.g. 'SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1' for port 220, IRQ 5 and DMA 1 in your autoexec.bat. Also, you should try Space Quest 3 or King's 4, which can run from floppy, support EGA and MCGA modes and AdLib sound cards. Not sure though if the emulator only emulates the DSP part of the Sound Blaster or the AdLib as well, which is much harder without a YM3812.
Nice video, and very interesting, thanks for that! I'm not surprised EGA is the slowest .... It uses bit planes and multiple modes of the access of the so called "colour-bytes" from the view of the CPU with other oddities, while VGA 320*200 (also called MCGA) is kinda regular, etc (do not mention X-Mode now and other non-standard VGA tricks). Sounds strange since Amiga also knows about bit planes etc etc, but as far as I can guess (I'm not so much familiar with Amiga, unfortunately) quite different method to access the bit planes (AFAIK Amiga can access all bit planes directly, while EGA needs that multiple-mode tricky colour byte theory ....). So in fact, in EGA emulation, I can imagine it's horrible slow to bridge the differences ... I'm even surprised it comes out this fast!
I wouldn't call that card an emulator. Technically, it is an entire PC minus the I/O part (sound, video, input). I guess the word "emulation" was used here more as a marketing than a technical term.
I'm guessing it's technically an emulator in that while code executes natively on the x86, the 68000 is emulating other parts of the system like the display adapter and floppy controller.
Its what was referred to back in those days as "hardware emulation", as opposed to software emulation. For older but similar examples see the various "Z-80 cards" for the Apple II or the CP/M cartridge for the Commodore 64.
I actually had one of these. My school had computer science courses and they only did Turbo Pascal. Could not afford a complete PC so I bought one of these. It was slow as hell, but it ran Turbo Pascal fast enough to get my courses done.
Well this is what fancies me, Amigas and MS-Dos, all in one!
5:32 I didn't know the Amiga pull down thing was in the first version too!
VGA is an easier mode in general because its pretty much just a regular, 256 color bitmap, while ega use all sort of non-planar bit manipulation wackery.
There's a lot of weird VGA modes as well, some software would change the timing like Populous or Lemmings.
All of the Amiga's graphics modes were planar. And VGA's 640x480 16 colour mode was planar too.
I have a vague recollection of a 286 PC as similar expansion for A500. Hmmm...
The Amiga 2000 had an add-on 286 expansion card (bridgeboard) also. I'm pretty sure you could also emulate a Mac on the Amiga 500.
Is it possible the VGA is running in the actual VGA monochrome mode (yes, there was such a thing) and thus not having to shift as much memory around as the EGA colour one? As for PCs, I also bought one in 1993 to replace my Amiga 1200, but it was a 40MHz 386SX costing around £500--couldn't afford high-end gear like a 486!
hmmh. 1993 is about the time we got our second PC. Cost $2300 Australian dollars. 486 SX 25 mhz with (early) SVGA, a Pro Audio Spectrum 16 and a 2x CD-ROM drive. (I forget the other specifications), ran dos 6.21 and windows 3.11
Those early SVGA cards topped out at something like 800x600, primarily due to lack of VRAM, but it was still pretty solid.
(the only old PC components I still have, though I wish I had kept more, since I got rid of a bunch around 2000ish is a two floppy drives, and a 2 megabyte SVGA card - though not the one from this original 486)
Of course, we had owned a PC already as early as 1990, which was a 286 (but that's all I know about it and what kind of specs it had. My guess is it was about 16 mhz with EGA graphics but running to a monochrome monitor.)
I bought the same, it was even the same price, but mine was to replace my 500, was going to get a 1200 with a 120mb hd and the pc was the same price, a year later it became a 486/66 just by replacing the motherboard and cpu. So all in all it was a little over £700 for a 4mb dx2 66.
Nice to have as a piece of history. Makes you appreciate what we are capable of running these days doesn't it? Thanks for sharing.
Reminds me of a similar product that was made for the Mac. That allowed Macs to run PC software. I can't remember what it was called or who made it.
Many years ago I had a pc dos emulator on my Amiga 1200. I managed to get it running the Seetrax DOS Ranger circuit and pcb cad design. It was very slow and took an age to pan across a page but it did work. It was too slow to use it for anything serious but good to see my Amiga able to do it
On my first 286 with EGA, Prince of Persia was almost unplayable- and that was on a 20mhz machine. I was so glad when I got my 386 motherboard....
Surely not. It's only a touch slow on an Amstrad 1640 with NECV30 in EGA,. and fine in CGA, and that's only 8mhz.
A 20mhz 286 should handle POP with ease... unless the EGA chipset is *incredibly* bad, I suppose.
@@TheTurnipKing It was a cheap homebrew using the type of collection of parts you get by a college student working on spare change with parts catalogs. EVERYTHING on it was incredibly bad, right down to the fact that hard disks were still quite out of my price range, and the case was cardboard.
But yes, something was very strange with Prince of Persia and certain implementations of the EGA chipset.
Theodore. Your cardboard case story reminds me of a friend at college who bought a £99 colour monitor for his BBC Computer. Sure it worked fine but for £99 all he got was a chassis originally designed for an Arcade machine and he had to make his own case out of chipboard :-)
Yeah I remember weighing these options back in the day. Just hanging out with my buddy that had just upgraded to a 486 was enough for me to appreciate DOS gaming, but having the Amiga was what made it so special anyway. I eventually got a Packard Bell Pentium when my Amiga finally crapped out and the Lisa chip melted lol. I think Amiga users were the original hipsters...
I wasn't aware you could even run something like this from the trapdoor slot. Very interesting video. Still, it's not a good enough excuse to not also have a retro PC build :-D
Hmmm, tinkling with that card would be fun, just changing the original NEC V10 for a FPGA emulating a 8086 but at 100 MHz or more
That would never work as the RAM/support chips would be too slow, and the Amiga 500's CPU is too slow to emulate all the missing PC hardware in software (graphics/sounds etc...) at that speed...
You're better off putting a RISC chip in an amiga and using DOSBOX or equiv emulators...
What a fascinating little board. I have a similar board (could be the same? Not sure, as it came without the box) for my A2000, and I always found it to be a neat little oddity
That was fun, didn't know that existed
Thank you for a look at a card that I nearly got for myself. I was young and foolish and instead saved up for an Amstard DX4 100 a few years later. Oh the disapointment even though it turned out that the Amstard was a really good PC, it's just that PCs where running at 100 mhz running windows 3.1 were still outclassed by an amiga running at 7.
I think the Amiga 500 was more the equivalent to a very low end 386 like a SX25 or maybe even a very high end 286. It had nothing on a 486...Especially a 100MHz 486. That machine would have ran Doom, quake, Duke nukem 3d, bloody hell I bet it would have a good go at Tomb Raider or Resident Evil and there's no way those games would run on an Amiga 500.
Thanks Richard. I jumped from an A500 to a 486 SX33 and remember enjoying the games and CDROM drive (the A570 CDROM on my Amiga had very few titles to run) but Windows felt like a big downgrade. I then put a DX4 100 in it and some extra RAM. Windows was still...Windows...but that thing flew compared to the old A500. I'm afraid I wasn't looking back at that stage.
Yeah, a DX4/100 is about as fast as a 50MHz 68040, give or take. Though an Amiga with a fast 040 would have been a nicer experience than a PC with Windows. Compared to, say, OS/2 or NeXTSTEP, maybe not - but the Amiga would have handily won for games!
Lassi Kinnunen : I got mine around March or April ish 1994; Windows 95 was not out, I was stuck with the supplied DOS and Windows 3.1. This used cooperative multitasking whereas the Amiga had true preemptive multitasking, also the hardware with the custom chips performing separate tasks independently such as disk io, mouse functions etc and the os being highly efficient and written for the hardware was far more effective.
Basically I had to buy additional ram and a better graphics card and windows 95 a year later for it to be comparable (to me). Thankfully yes I did have doom and later duke nukem 3D to sweeten the deal. I did however use my computer for far more than gaming.
You have to be careful comparing the OS experience of Amiga to PC OS of the time. Of course the Amiga wins there. But in terms of raw processing power it was beat quickly by the competition. Also a lot of Amiga programmers had a leg up in terms of optimization for a bit.
It doesn’t surprise me that Prince of Persia EGA ran slower than VGA; EGA was much more complex to program for and difficult to optimize, whereas VGA just provided a flat framebuffer and was even easier than CGA (but CGA had way less memory to move around so its performance generally wins out overall).
OMG Leaderboard.. i used to play that on my C64...may have to breakout the C64 at the weekend.. :)
Ahh, good old Alley Cat. I remember playing that as a kid on an IBM Clone 8086
Trinitron, the best display ever.
My switch from my Amiga 500 Plus to PC was also to a Packard Bell. Although, it was a Pentium Packard Bell by the time I switched. :)
Oh my, this is beautiful.
You are actually getting AT class speeds. The V30 is a 16 bit data bus chip, like the 68000. The IBM PC was 16 bits inside the CPU but 8 bits everywhere else. The 8-bit data bus made using parts for earlier generation ( 8080/8085) PC s easier. The V20/ V30 also had an 8080 compatible mode inside. They could run CPM-80 applications under MSdos. I wonnder how data files could be moved between Amiga and PC modes.Thanks for more odd and historic computer stuff. It is always a pleasure!
I still have my KCS Power PC board. I bought in the early 90s for £120.
Heh, Alley Cat. I vividly remember that one.
I am shocked, SHOCKED, that there wasn't, as far as I can tell, a PD Amiga knockoff.
Interesting stuff!
there was software I remember using , share or free ware that could run ibm exe files - also was fun porting stuff over serial from amiga A500 to/from friends atariST and running it
Could have been PC Transformer or PC Task?
Just looks wrong seeing MS Dos on the Amiga. However you have a point it’s for ruby PC “work” programs not playing games
I would run Morraf's World on that in a heartbeat. DOS AND AmigaOS on my future Amiga machine? Yes please.
I remember converting a similar board for my ST. Ended up getting a Dan 486 instead, around 1993.
This is really cool. Wish it could have had a little better cpu. But it is still cool for what it is.
I'm surprised it doesn't support CGA's composite mode, since it's being output over composite! (Or, now that I think about it, I don't know if CGA composite worked right on PAL...) The golf game is definitely meant to be run in CGA composite, not Cyan/Magenta/White digital mode.
Honestly, when it came to gaming, Amiga was the undisputed king, but in terms of non-game software, IBM compatibles were the absolute reigning masters of the computer world, with the Macintosh coming in at second.
There was much more variety than you imply in the early 1990s. At work the engineers used PCs, Unix workstations like Sun, and the Vax mainframe, while the managers had Macs as Executive status symbols. At home friends and colleagues had an equal variety of computers, with low end PCs, and Amigas. I had the absolute reigning master of music sequencing at the time, an Atari ST, while one of the managers I mentioned was a huge fan of the Acorn Archimedes, only reluctantly switching to a Mac at home many years later.
The Acorn Archimedes was a great computer!
My dad used to have one for a biology research lab he had been working at up until around 1995 I think.
It was really underrated at the time and should have been more popular in my opinion.
It barely had any games made for it, but the Archimedes found its way into professional use, mainly among scientists I believe.
The Archimedes was also historically important as it was the very first ARM computer and was extremely efficient at pushing out integer calculations very quickly.
I had this card in my Amiga 500 back in 93 I think. They had a tradein for your old memory expansion, and with that is was the same price as a 512K expansion. For games it was pretty useless. Slow for one, when going any further than cga. And as I didn't have a harddrive, even slower... What I did use it for extensively though is programming in what was called PowerBasic, and I had a blast writing pc software on my Amiga. Great times, when computers had a charm of their own.
Shame I sold it with my A500 when that broke and I moved on to a real pc. Would love to still have that piece of history in the attick...
I have an A2386SX! Sigh, I need to finish some repairs on it.
The problem with the KCS board was that by the time it was released in 1991 an XT PC was already terribly out of date. A 386 was pretty much required to run most modern software and by early 1993 a 486 was absolutely mandatory.
As you say, adding all these emulation boards to a suitably souped up Amiga was usually more expensive than buying a standalone PC, and not as good. A major problem with the A500 was of course interlace flicker. Many modes used for business software would be absolutely impossible to endure on a normal Amiga. Add the cost of a flicker fixer and you're way beyond what a PC costs.