Hi everyone! Thanks to everyone who pointed out the issue on my first Amiga was the fact my GVP 030 accelerator is configured to fill up the first 8mb of RAM in the 24 bit Zorro II address space. I'm well aware of the limitation of 8mb of RAM there maximum --- but at one point I had been fiddling with the jumpers on that card (for another reason) and I guess I left it set that way. I always assumed it would be using only 32bit memory space for the 12mb of RAM that's on it. DOH! So that'll likely fix it all -- several people confirmed Janus works fine on all versions of Kickstart and with all accelerators. Double DOH!!!!!!!!
The problem with the floppy on the A2088 is that the cable shouldn't have a twist. The A drive is connected internally with a cable without twist, and you can connect an Amiga drive as B: drive on the external connector
@@janhofmeier9427 Good one -- I guess they went back to a normal cable on the 286 one. Yeah the original cable and drive is in the machine that I couldn't get working (due to the memory configuration)
@@adriansdigitalbasement yes the A2286 uses a normal cable. IT doesn't have the external connector so both Drives go on the internal. See my other longer comment for more Details
Also in regards to a graphics card I use an original IBM cga card. I hook the composite out to the composite in on my 1084 and simply use the rgb/composite switch to flip between pc and amiga. Totally awesome. Using a cga card you can play games and applications at full speed. Definitely recommend that. Also a 1084 monitor has digital and analog input as you know already but you cant hook both in at the same time for some reason even though there is an rgb/ttl switch so I use composite as explained. You could put in a 9pin switch box I guess. Ill try that some day and use the switch box to flip back and forth while also toggling the ttl switch (kind of a pain but it works). Try playing with the amouse dos tool and also the tools which allow file copying between the amiga and pc side. Works well also! I actually have a gotek hooked to the bridge card also vs old floppy drive and the controller will read up to 720k disks. The bridge cards actually work great. There is a learning curve though. Check out the replacement for pcwindow which is called viaduct. It will render the Bridgecard onto an rtg graphics card for better color and performance. Totally recommend viaduct.
In fairness, nobody with an Amiga in the 1980s was adding a Brodgeboard for graphics or games. It was access to PC business programs, which will run decently in 2 or 4 color modes with MDA the best option.
@@lucasrem What on earth are you whining about? He made a simple observation about why people used a bridge boards back in the '80s. PC games back then were generally graphically and sonically worse than the stuff the Amiga had. PCs were still considered business machines. Grow up.
It's probably different for everyone but I added the bridgeboard to play pc games. I love rpg games and the pc had them all in those days. I added a hard disk (two partitions, so you could use it for both systems) and EGA card as well. I loved my amiga 2000
Why would anyone add an inferior system to the Amiga. That just doesn't make sense. Amiga was galaxies ahead- Until Commodore killed her with the worst business handling in the history of computers. I would NEVER add a PC card to my beloved girl. Ever!
Team Retr-o-mat here. We have alot of experience with those cards. If you have any questions about them and problems you cannot solve we are here for you. We are visiting conventions where we are exibitors showing the bridgeboards in action.
I just made 3 partitions and installed Workbench 3.1, Mac OS, and Windows simultaneously to the same hard drive. Added the co-processor chip, and a full size engineering level graphics card for the 486 PC bridgeboard. All platforms available on a 19" Sony Trinitron with separate inputs for each. Adobe suite on the Mac, MS Office and AutoCAD on the PC worked flawlessly.
I am 65 and remember the wonderful days of MSDOS , I even remember when PCDOS 1.1 first arrived! I was there when CPM was first made available. Oh those were heady times.
I really enjoyed that video - I have a 2286 card in my A2000 as well, and your struggles remind me of mine with that card. First, I can only confirm what others say - it works with either up to 6M RAM on the Zorro bus, or with all extra memory moved to 32 bit space with a 030 accelerator. The card is totally compatible with Kickstart 3.1, so that's definitely no issue. Regarding the battery issue - I bought a coin-cell battery holder that can replace the type of Lithium battery that came with the A2286 originally, and it works like a charm. No more entering setup when starting the A2286. What really drove me crazy was to get an IDE controller working on the PC side. This definitely needs a more modern BIOS to work with SD cards or any modern media, but the Janus handlers taking up the D000 address space are a real pain. I was finally able to get it to work with a version of EZ drive, a workaround developed to get past the HD space limitation of early PC controllers. Using this, I could finally get an IDE controller to work on the PC side, and this really makes a difference in speed. The same is true if you plug in a VGA card - full speed as you would expect it on a 286 PC. Don't worry about the PC Prefs on the Amiga - plugging in a VGA card will totally disable the PC display on the Amiga side. However, you still need to start PC Mono to have the keyboard and mouse signals forwarded to the PC (or you use the keyboard connector on the A2286 to connect a PC keyboard (there's a pin header for connecting a PC keyboard directly to the card, you have to build an adapter yourself, however). You can minimize the window down to a very small size, though.
I had no problem getting a general ISA I/O card IDE adapter to work with an IDE-CF adapter (SD mote often works on IDE adapters). But I needed to use Ontrack Bios overlay software to make a boot record. No reason to connect a PC keyb. There are commodities on Aminet for swapping with hotkey without running anything visual.
Note that internally on the bridgeboard, the display is running at full speed. It is the speed of the Amiga copying that PC Bridgeboard display ram to the Amiga chipram which generates that sluggish output. So even if you used a spreadsheet, you were able to cope. Games on the other hand were useless. You would need to plug in a VGA board for that.
Yeah my guess is that the shared ram is not dual port ram. So the two large PLAs handle swapping that ram back and forth between the Zoro and PC busses. meaning you get, at best, 50% ram performance on both ends. Any processing that STAYS on the PC side should run at full speed though. So, I would assume that, for example, ISA network cards, hard disks, and a video card would run at the same performance as any same spec pc. Mouse and keyboard passing through that shared memory might not be noticibly sluggy, but may want some dedicated solution for gaming there as well. Soooo.. now you have a fully decked out PC, crammed inside your Amiga. I have always drooled over them back in the day, but their only REAL use is to give the Amiga access to things that were otherwise really expensive on the miggy, like networking, cheaper IDE storage, and "business" software.
Default is MDA mode, 1 bit ANSI text mode is fast enough and what you need for WP and Lotus123. Its a jumper setting on A2088XT. Note, most A2088XT can run 50% faster just using a DOS command. 7.5 mhz.
As I remember it back in the day the Amiga was generally thought of as a much better gaming machine than the PC's of the day (as it had better graphics and sound than the average CGA based PC with beeper sounds). This means that people who bought these bridge boards generally did so for work purposes, usually word processing and spreadsheets. I think it is worth trying the 286 card with a VGA card as the CGA graphics here looks to be a software emulation rather than a hardware adaptor and as such shouldn't cause a conflict. While there is not much computing power for games on a 286 there were 386 class bridge boards as well which rumour says could be upgraded with a clip on 486 module.
I can't remember if mine was a 286 or 386 BB, but I bought one of those Cyrix 486SLC clip-on CPUs and it worked great, even though it only had 1K of L1 cache IIRC. Unfortunately I found out the hard way that once you install it, never ever remove it. It came with a small green stick-on heat sink, but obviously got hot enough to make the exposed wires on the clip-on brittle. I can't remember now why I wanted to remove it, but when I did most of the wires for the chip just crumbled. ;-(
I had a 286 daughter card for my A500, and that was my experience. Never bothered to run games. It was mainly so I could do my homework up at college since my professors all required us to use specific DOS-based programs. Worked perfectly for those applications, but you did have to tinker with the memory a bit
@@nicholas_scott sounds like the definitive experience back then, all the perks of a gaming beast and the compatibility for general purpose. How expensive that setup was?
Amazing video as always, Adrian! The BEST part of owning one of these cards was lording it over your PC friends that you could multitask and run their software in the background. It didn't matter that it was slow - the multitasking switch back and forth was enough to make everyone jealous!
I will never get tired of these absolutely massive add-on cards. Something about the size, filled with all those components shoved in makes them look great. You only get those with GPUs nowadays.
Yay I'm glad you were able to use the cards! It's really interesting that you posted this video on the weekend that you did. I had been out of town all weekend on an Amiga rescue mission where I picked up two A4000s and an A2000HD all with battery corrosion damage. If you ever find yourself in Wisconsin I'll make sure to buy you some cheese curds!
Regarding plugging floppy drives in backwards: one of the pins which ends up being selected is the write enable pin, which results in the drive magnetically erasing whichever track the head happened to be looking at at the time. When working with hardware, always remember to remove any valuable floppies before powering on if you're replacing floppy drives!
I ran PC-Task (full software emulation) on my accelerated A1200 and while the screen updates were very slow the actual code (while still slow) ran much better. The best way to mess with people was to run PC-Task (PC emulation) & Shapeshifter (Mac emulation) at the same time. It was great watching peoples minds explode when you showed all of them running at the same time.
@@remijakobsen1848 Didn't have it at the time (still don't), but it would have been fun to emulate a Mac to emulate a PC while emulating a PC from the Amiga. Although now I think about it, there could be the possibility it would tear open a hole in the universe :-/
@@daishi5571 I tested it yesterday. Softwin is more refined than PC Task. It got graphic drivers in 68k code in Win3.11 that comes with it, so it runs faster than in PCTask.
I think the pc card is really cool just to see dos and amiga multitasking between them :D I already knew the downsides of this card, so I was not disappointed when I got it.
In my opinion there is no twist on the floppycable for the XT Card. So if you use the twisted cable your floppy drive will be drive B! So Drive A is bad. Btw i love your Videos i see every video from you. Take up the good work. Greetings from germany.
There was something satisfying about hearing you say "TTL logic", perhaps it's the symmetry it creates since it stands for "transistor-transistor logic logic"
I remember working at a few places in the late 80's that had various amigas with bridge boards, and the PC part was mostly used for spreadsheets, Word Perfect or using the corporate PC software, so video update speed wasn't really a big issue. The fact that they were using Amigas in the first place meant that anything with heavy graphic content (CAD, design etc) was being done on the Amiga side.
I will say, this was one of the most impressive parts manufactured. An accelerator to drop on top of the processor. Technically impressive, but lost the contract to not being radiation hardened. Also, the brats are safe. They hung for a month before being sent to you.
This low update rate brings back memories from surfing ABBS boards. I remember it was easy to tell if the SysOp was watching your terminal, because it slowed down for each line shift. Lol. Anyway, It is cool having an XT computer running inside the amiga :)
I had a sidecar for my a1000, then a bridge board for my 2000. This was very neat being able to use the ibm hdd with the Amiga etc. and let me do my pc based assignments at the time. Pretty ground breaking at the time that you had two different computer hardware running on the same display etc. good times
The window sometimes only being on half of the screen when you switch resolution is a bug in the Janus 2.1 software. The Janus 2.1 software was technically only for the 2386SX Bridgeboard, but it worked with the XT/AT ones as well (but never shipped with those cards).
My opinion as a cross platform developer today is, if I had to work at this time on a cross platform software for interfacing, industrial or whatever without the ability of virtual machines, this would have been a dream. Also not fiddling around with two machines on one bench and exchanging data with floppies would have been the optimal situtation. Therefore the poor graphics is no problem. Or the other point you mentioned, connecting to a mainframe, where e.g. you only have software for a x86 machine could relief your headaches using an amiga. Keep going on making such good videos and a happy weekend.
we used Laplink over 232 or printer port back in the day. for full final guranteed working product, you need real target metal on the bench, VMs can only be trusted so far.
the bridge card was the solution for people who took computer classes in school and had to hand in their homework e.g. in Borland Pascal, TurboC or whatever.
@@Great-Documentaries Exactly. not many students! but some did absolutly not want a native dos machine. (and concerning prices: when you started with HDDs and multisync CRTs, the prices were even higher. in other words: it's a question of priorities)
@@rarbiart Commodore also sold a primitive MDA-only software emulator called Transformer that was good enough if you didn't care about speed or the ability to run anything with graphics.
Video speed - gotta remember, it's having to send across the bus to the Amiga side, get it into the chip ram, then have the amiga side render it... If you use a dedicated video card on the PC side it should be just fine.
@@Great-Documentaries Back in the day you probably would have opted for a CGA or EGA (with 15Khz support) card instead, to avoid having to buy a second monitor (most of the Amiga monitors support digital RGBi as well as the analog RGB for the Amiga). Now though yes obviously VGA would be the better choice, for sure.
Does that apply to all versions of the Zorro Bus, or only to Zorro II? Just being curious, as I only have an A1200 (with a 4MB RAM + 68881 FPU expansion card), and therefore have no chance of using a bridgeboard ;)
@@BertGrink Zorro I/II yes. Zorro III has 32-bit address space so if you add Z3 cards running in Z3 mode, they should allocate from Z3 space. There are expansions for the A1200 that will actually let you use a bridgeboard. Most of them are Zorro II only. There was one design that allowed you to use (non-DMA) Zorro III but it required an A3000/A4000 CPU card to allow Z3 to work (since the A1200 expansion port only has 24-bit addressing, but if you put a 32-bit CPU card on the bus expansion then it could bypass this).
@@NozomuYume Thank you for your reply; i was certain that Zorro III was 32-bits, and therefore wouldn´t have such restrictions, but I thought it better to ask. Also, I am aware that there has been different "big box" expansions for the A1200 which included a motherboard with ZIII, PCI, or both; this has unfortunatly been outside of my financial ability to purchase. Thus my A1200 + RAM/FPU remains my only hardware option. There´s still emulation, though, where i can have ANY setup i want, something I often indulge in :D
I love SOB cards! (system on a board) My Sun E420R server has the SunPCI III board with a mobile Athlon 1600+ at 1.4GHz. Unlike your ordeal, this just worked perfectly out of the box. And it really is a completely independent computer. I tend to think of that server as a PC surrounded by a full fledged 4x SPARC UNIX machine! As if the PC had caused the UNIX server to come into existence.
I had a sidekick for a 1000, and it worked, but I can't think of a reason a person would have wanted to run a 286 when they had an Amiga. I still have two AT boards, meant to fit in a 2000, which were installed on two A2000s I purchased. . I pulled them, because I just couldn't find a use for them. One of the boards, has all the chips populated on one main board, and the other, has a daughter board, that mad it a tight squeeze to install a board beside it.. I remember, getting suckered into buying the "new" DOS 5, and remember feeling ripped off. Yeah, the good old days..
A discrete VGA card and a discrete hard disk were almost a must for users of the BridgeBoards. It was the only way to overcome the Amiga's lack of 256 color support and slow screen updates and slow drive performance on the emulated hard disk partition.
Nowadays companys use Proxmox for VMs to have several virtual machines or develop cross-architecture, but back in the days I think this card was a huge help and saved some space. I like your videos a lot and have always learned something new. It is as if I would go to my friend's house back in the days when he has gotten something new and we explored it together. Greetings from Germany and keep up the good work.
As a university student I needed a PC/MS DOS for Lotus123 and Borland Turbo Pascal. I upgraded from a stock A500 (which was purely used for games) to the A2000 with the A2088 bridgeboard with an MFM PC hard drive which was split so the Amiga could use it too. SCSI hard drives for the Amiga were just way too expensive. The Amiga couldn't boot from it, but once the PC software was started it worked fine. As this was my first PC/computer with a hard drive it was a major upgrade and a lot faster than using floppy disks. Buying a separate PC with a monitor would have cost a lot more.
Thanks for the light show. It is inevitable that mistakes are going to happen, I am glad that no serious damage was done to the card. That is a neat trick to determine the faulty cap that is in line with other caps on the same circuit.
I may have a newer Janus.library, it's still there A4000 backup's on WinUAE, though it cant do anything there. Just a note: I had Comodore's 386SX Bridgeboard working on my A3000 and A4000 with kickstart 3.0/3.1 if I remember correctly. There was a patch for the janus library you need to get for all the bridgeboards to run in 3.x, though is may be described only for the 386 model, it should work for all bridgeboards. I'm willing to send a copy out, though it will be inside a .hdf file with the full Janus PC install on the HD as files, not. the original install disks.
It still totally amazes me that ASICs reduced this vast constellation of chips to one or two in latter day network cards! I remember so well chassis-spanning token ring cards that cost a fortune in the early days of office networks! I was certain that token ring was the future! And ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) was next!
They might have been, had we not invented switched ethernet. The PC world is rife with "good enough", cheap, and short term solutions that had higher priced, better designed competitors that were predicted to someday overtake the cheap solution do to better design. What actually happened though was that Moore's law took over, and the "better design" lost to just shoving silicon at the more popular and cheaper first solution. That's how we got ethernet over everything else, and x86 over the predicted rise of RISC chips. IBM tried the same thing with the better designed (but proprietary and controlled by IBM) MCA bus to replace the ISA bus. The clone makers fought back, and designed EISA, and later on something actually decent, PCI. Microchannel was a much better design than just modifying ISA a bit, and had auto-config of IO and IRQ built in. It took until PCI for the clones to get that.
I remember my dad literally bought the Amiga 1000 because of the existence of these IBM bridge-boards. He thought he would be able to use it to bring work stuff home and have the best of both worlds, but ALAS it was a huge disappointment straight out of the box and was never used for its intended purpose. Before long we had a real PC and an Amiga sitting side by side.
I think for the POST card to work on the 286 bridge card it would have to be connected directly to it. I think that because if the bridge card is in the main board expansion slot, the post card should be responding to the Amiga main board, not the 286 bridge.
I had an A2000 with kickstart 1.3 and a Bridgeboard 386SX - 16 Mhz in the early 90's. I didn't experience the kinds of the software bugginess you had in your video, so I guess the kickstart version might have something to do with it. The motherboard had all 16 bit ISA connectors except 1 that was 8 bit. I simply soldered in the missing connector and used a VGA - card in it. It really made a big improvement for the display performance of my Bridgeboard. I think the VGA - card just worked without any fiddling with the software and I used to play pc - games with the Bridgeboard before selling my Amiga and moving to 486DX2-66.
Hello from Wisconsin! I love your videos. I've been plowing through them. I love listening to you troubleshoot computers. I'm an electronics nerd, who has just been learning how it all works through osmosis over the years, so I've learned a lot from your videos. I regularly repair very basic audio electronics, but I'm like a Caveman with a lighter most of the time, just fiddling around trying to fix things. Thanks for what you do! I've used some of your affiliate links to buy some more gear for my repairs, I hope that helps.
Ahh the video toaster - had so much fun with that in the early 90’s. We had a Panasonic “M2” format vtr that could record 1 frame (or more for lower FPS) from lightwave - it would take a few seconds to a minute to render a frame, then the vtr would rewind a bit, play, and record that frame (the rec light would briefly flicker too), and then wait for the Amiga to finish the next frame. Would have a nice little animation… the next morning!
This, "remove the card, insert it again" and the "reset button" are 2 things showing how complex a computer is. Really great piece of engineering, yet so complex that it's better to stop, clean and start again.
You don't need to physically swap ROMs to run a different Kickstart version; use something like ReloKick to load a different version into RAM and you're good to go. (And as everyone else has pointed out, your accelerated machine is eating all the address space.)
As far as I know, those bridge boards need 512k autoconfig memory space and your gvp accelerator occupies the whole 8m, the bridgeboard is thus not configured by amigaos, and thats why sysinfo shows "size=0k". Remove some ram from your accelerator or move the ram out of 24bit memory space, to get enough free space in the autoconfig area...
I used a similar ( smaller ) card in the AtariST called AT Speed and used it for BlueWave, a BBS email reader. Also I ran Windows3 and some other DOS/Win only stuff. Was a small board that fits on the CPU and shared memory with the ST. The back and forth switching, keeping the RAM status on the ST system was just very awesome. It was both hardware emulation and virtualisation.
I used to run these with a separate VGA-card and that improved the speed quite noticeably! Then again I used to compare the speed with my original PC and then this wasn't too bad!
The second Amiga has the HDD and power LEDs reversed. Also, beware of having a floppy disc in a disc drive while the floppy cable is reversed; it often ruins the software on the disc completely.
I used to use one of those XT cards in an Amiga 1000, it was painfully slow and equally painfully buggy. I feel for you. Remember, I was doing all this when the gear was new and with docs.
OLD sockets sockets sockets. Always a good idea to pop the chips and reseat on these old cards.. I've owned alot of these bridgeboards,they are fairly reliable,except for battery leaks on the 2386 cards. i have always used these on 3.1 roms with no trouble. You can use a external amiga drive on the external bridgeboard 23pin connector as a PC floppy. hardfiles are painfully slow,a real drive helps for the pc side. adding a vga card also helps since video etc is being pushed thru the zorro2 buss at a max of 3.5MB/s(if that!)
Janus's display is sampled and reconstructed as a planar image. It's the major bottleneck for all the Bridgeboards. But it was good enough to run productivity apps, which is why we all used them.
A few things come to mind 1. The A2065 networks cards are still very usefull, even without the adapter, you could run a coax network between the two cards. 2. Regarding the issue with sdcard and A2091 it could be related to the WD scsi controller chip on the A2091 most of those cards are born with a rev 3 or rev 4 of the WD33C93A chip which is know to have issues with "scsi disconnects" and since the sdcard is removeable then it probably utilizes disconnects (just thinking out loud on this one - no familiar with the particular adapter you use). For the least issues / best performance a combination of rev 8 scsi chip, guru rom, and 14mhz speed mod is kinda the goto combo for the A2091. 3. The slow graphics speed is kinda what you would expect - all the graphics has to be transfered through the bridgeboard and through zorro II and then through the onboard amiga agnus into the chip ram before finally being displayed by denise... and somewhere along the way it has to be converted from chunky to planar graphics - not sure if this happen in the custom asic's, or on the 68k cpu/janus library or at what step but it just HAS to be slow by design... dedicated vga card/multi monitor must be the way to go. I wonder if it would help with a RTG (chunky enabled) zorro II graphics card (doubt janus software supports direct to rtg but maybe someone patched it). 4. Any thoughts on overclocking the 286 i.e. with that 20mhz 286 chip you have ?
2:45 When I first went to work for an ISP in the mid-1990s, I was confused why almost all of our networking equipment had 10Base-5 ports, despite the fact it was almost entirely obsolete, in the face of 10Base-2 and 10Base-T(X). (We actually found a 10Base-5 segment with a vampire tap one day in 1997 or 1998, hidden under a false floor, and were surprised by it -- nobody still working there knew it was there!) It was cheaper to provide a 10Base-5 interface, instead of both 10Base-2 and 10Base-T, and 10Base-5 incidentally provided power to the port, which could power a transceiver to your choice of interface, instead of needing an external power supply. And if you were spending several thousand dollars on a piece of equipment, the cost of a transceiver was negligible. That said, it was much more common for consumer equipment of the time to come with anywhere from one to three of those interfaces.
Bought my Amiga 1000 2 weeks after it came out, with the rumor that some PC OS software was being made, so 2 weeks after I bought the Amiga 1000 the Transformer Software package came out, bought it, and ran the PC Software Lotus 123, Dbase, Word Perfect, and other types of office software, since I was doing Lotus 123 and Dbase programming using macro's, it got me through the year with what I needed to do. A little bit slower, but good enough to do my work at home when my Otrana carry computer went and broke. By the way it is great seeing a person who knows how to run a Amiga and Dos. I used the Amiga Transformer and PC-task. both ran well on an Amiga, but when I put it on an Amiga Emulator on today's PC, they actually run faster then the boards and emulators made for an Amiga.
The 8088 card shipped with a 5.25 floppy drive and a straight cable -- no twisty. That is what you tried on the 1st Amiga, but because of the GVP card you moved to the second Amiga. On the second Amiga you used a 3.5 floppy drive and connected it to the twisty end. What happens if you connect a 5.25 to the straight end. Also, you didn't seem to notice in the video, but the Drive A Fail happened on both your 8088 cards; that was the fail message you were seeing corrupted by the ram problem on the second card, which is what makes me think you have a cabling problem.
Have you tried connecting the floppy drive to the "B" connector (without the twist)? It's been a long time since I've seen one of those in the flesh, but I seem to remember it was a straight cable without twist (of course the floppy could be jumpered to the other ID...).
Shame he didn't realise all 3 cards had the same floppy problem, ie, highly unlikely 3 cards have the exact same fault, so your cable idea is probably right.
Looking back, its amazing that people had in their hands a graphics and music wonder computer yet the motivation was to scramble into geting MS-DOS on their Amigas! Shows the power of having killer apps.
I mean, the number of amiga users who added bridgeboards was pretty small. But there certainly was a market for them. If you already owned an amiga 2000, the bridgeboard was way cheaper than buying a whole additional 286, and way more convenient on the desk. Nearly every Amiga user who bought it to play games was on an A500 for cost reasons.
Almost fifty on my personal gauge, still big sentiment to Commodore Amiga.. I had three, 500, 600, 1200 Tower. Still have a bunch of floppy discs, (most of them stored in my PC). Beautiful times, lot of nostalgia... Greets from Poland - from automation engineer.
I had the 286 bridgeboard on my Amiga 2000, back in the day (I didn't have an accelerator, just stock Amiga 2000) when I was a college student (low-budget gaming/development box). I used an 8-bit MFM HD controller with a 30MB Kalok drive on the 286-side, partitioned 10MB for the 286, 20MB for the Amiga, I had to boot the Amiga side on floppy, custom script to start the bridgeboard, then wait for about 45 seconds, then it would mount the 286's hard-drive back to the amiga, and run the rest of the workbench startup from the hard drive. I also had a 16-bit VGA card on the 286-side, and a second monitor on top of a plank I put across the top of the Amiga 2000 case, to support the 2 CRTs side-by-side. The hot-key on amiga keyboard would switch between which system was being typed into. I could even run VGA DOS games, since had the dedicated hardware for the video. Add in the MAC emulator software, and could have Mac running in a window on the Amiga side, the 286 running MS-DOS in it's monitor on the left monitor... all 3 running at once in real-time speed (no emulation, aside from video mapping for the Mac). This setup let me use a cheap IBM-compatible hard-drive on my Amiga, instead of the overpriced SCSI drives that were typically used on Amiga and Mac at the time.
Adrian, I noticed when testing the 286 board, you skipped passed the "Display Task Priority" option in the pulldown menus. Did you ever go back and test the highest "10" priority setting?
The GoldenGate 386 and 486 bridgeboards were pretty amazing pieces of kit; I wish I'd had a big box Amiga and one of those. I could've justified holding on to the Ami a little longer then. Some die-hards still use 2000s, 3000s and 4000s with ISA SBCs that are still made with modern systems on them - dual- and quad-core systems, tons of RAM, that could emulate the native Amiga faster than the Amiga itself! But I appreciate the effort! But, as they're SBCs and not Bridgeboards, unlike the 2086, 2088, and 2286 (and Golden Gate '386 and '486 cards), they're not accessible from the Amiga side as easily as the older ones.
Re: A2065 network cards - please support development of brand new Amiga software by buying a license if the Roadshow TCP/IP stack 🙂. It's 100% compatible with the A2065, maintained with updates dropping every now and then and written by AmigaOS developer Olaf 'Olsen' Barthel. While you're at it, please also consider upgrading your Amiga 2000 to the brand new AmigaOS 3.2, one of the biggest AmigaOS updates for legacy Amigas so far 👍.
53:00 Hi Adrian, having had a bridgeboard since 1990, my experience is as you found: the software based screen on the Amiga just stinks. It works fine, even with an XT bridgeboard, to just throw a VGA card in a PC slot. That is what I did for my #DOScember (2020) on the Amiga project. Peace.
Love the Amiga stuff, very interesting. I must dig out my A1500 from the back of the loft, but I fear the varta has probably killed it by now. Great video as usual Adrian, keep up the great work.
I started my ICT career with an Amiga 1200 and a 286 card that sat on top of the processor. I had to run dBase software. I have been an Amiga fan all those years!
back in the day, I think it was about 1989, I had a mate who designed and built his own 386 bridgeboard with 1MB RAM for his A2000, this was when at the time 286 bridgeboards were really the only ones you could afford. I told him he should have mass produced it and made some $$$ but he wasnt interested, for him it was more about the challenge to do it.
I had the 2000 with the AT bridgeboard. Sent it back within a couple of weeks as although I liked the hardware on the Amiga side, the AT side was so flakey, and I needed a PC specifically for my educational needs. Ended up getting a PC instead, and no Amiga again for nearly 30 years!
Emulators worked fine back in the day, trouble was people not on BBSes had to rely on consumer magazines, only ones such as Byte and PCW would do the technocall articles.
To answer your questen there have been Amiga 5.25" Floppys they usually had a switch on the backside to select 40/80 Tracks. They stored 440KB/880KB(1:1 3.5"). This drives have been Double Density not High Density. So it could read/write PC 360KB Floppys and and 720KB that was seldom used on PC atleast on 5.25".
@Adrian's Digital Basement Bridgeboards from Commadore used RAM of middle to low quality, I find. As a precaution, I always replaced all the RAM chips with compatible chips from a manufacturer that has a consistent quality I trust and put in double wipe sockets for future repair. I also re-capped them, including any solid-states, with all solid-state caps, as a way to make them last longer and to fix some of the IC issues. Those ICs are very picky about the current they get.
Hi, I've added the two 16bit missing parts of the ISA slots on my A2000 and with my A2386 they work fine I've also added a 16bit vga and a sound blaster with no problems.
Used my bridge card to run a bbs off of it for the amiga. Had an ibm harddrive controller and vga card installed along with a monitor dedicated to the pc side of things. Was great fun at the time. Ran with an Emplant card for Apple Mac OS as well. Made all my friends jealous. Lol
I own all the Commodore Bridgeboards and a Golden Gate 486sx and I'm somewhat of an expert. I have repaired these at the PCB level. The Commodore hardware and software requires some specific steps to set it up. Remove all other cards as well. Plug in a PC speaker and you will hear the Commodore 'chirp' when the Amiga reads Binddrivers in the startup-sequence. Use the Commodore utilities disk to create a HDD partition on an Amiga HDD (adisk). The XT card only works with a 360k FDD using a proper Commodore cable that does NOT have a twist. The DB25 on the back of the XT card is for an Amiga A1010 FDD which will give a 720k B: drive. You should also plug in a VGA card which runs quite well, especially with an A2630 accelerator. Fumbling around like you have been doing is not the way forward. The answer is pretty simple. RTFM....
@@remijakobsen1848 check the ram on the card. there is the PC-side RAM (640k etc) and there's also some shared RAM that the Amiga uses to talk to the PC side. schematics are available for the commodore cards, check it. I've been repairing arcade boards for ~25 years and RAM is the number 1 failed part on everything.
also, the A2286 has issues with open vias. if you look on your a2286 daughterboard you will find some jumper wires. mine has several and it got even more when I took it into an official commodore repair shop back in about 1990. they can be fixed by referencing the schematics and checking all connections with a multimeter. it can take months/years but it can be fixed as long as the special custom chips are not bad.
@@remijakobsen1848 shared ram is soldered in and must be removed and tested with something like a Retro ChipTester Pro. Logic can go bad too. Custom chips can go bad or the custom chips in sockets need to be removed, cleaned and re-seated. connections with sockets to chip is also a big problem. If you are repairing old stuff you need an RCT. I built a couple for myself, it's a very very nice thing for checking tens of thousands of different chips.
I guess I was rich because I had a A2386 with a VGA card on a 3000. I was fully loaded on that system. It took me through college, I ran DOS software on it and did my word processing on the Amiga side.
I am fighting with the same Janus error message here. Trying another A2000 is a valuable hint, which I have to try out. Cheers! I hope the performance improves when you limit the traffic that has to travel across the shared mem. That’s said to be a bottle neck. So an IDE ctrl and a vga card will hopefully help.
Just re-visiting this video as I just recently purchased an A2286AT Similar to what you have, I soldered in the two extra sockets to give me two more 16-bit ISA slots and have a Trident VGA card and a soundblaster 16 card... VGA I've tested and it works great in a two monitor setup, doesn't have the screen delay and such. I still haven't loaded into DOS as for some reason the FDD settings get set back to default due to the BIOS forgetting what it's doing. My A2286 card has a DALLAS 1287 RTC Module with integrated battery that failed, just purchase a coin cell drop in replacement and hopefully that will get me working with this.
When the hardware goes along (also add-on cards, and maybe a faster/cooler CPU is necessary) you can bump up the A2286 bridgeboard speed to more than 11MHz. Also Kingston 386-like-upgrade is possible swapping out the 286-CPU. Bottleneck to Amiga-side remains largely unchanged, of course.
I had trouble with a Transcend brand CF card in my Amiga. HDToolbox shows it, allows it to be partitioned, and save changes. Next reboot it will either appear like it is blank or it will have checksum errors after formatting with fastfilesystem and eventually just cause a crash. It causes no issues on a PC with fat formating. It took hours of searching online to find out that some transcend memory just doesn't play nice with Amiga partitions so you might try another SD card in your SCSI adapter.
That shouldn't really be an issue with a SCSI to SD adapter. The issue with CF Cards is they actually use a straight IDE interace internally, but some of them don't support the full IDE command set and are missing support for some of the more obscure commands that never get used on a PC but the Amiga IDE controllers need them. At least that's my understanding of it.
These bridgeboards were for the rich people, buying an A2000 and a Bridgeboard was a lot of money. But it wasn't the best solution. The KCS PowerPC board was a far better Amiga PC compatibility solution. First, it is compatible with the most popular Amiga, the 500, which means it was affordable for mere mortals. It was also more usable, it has faster screen updates, emulates everything up to EGA (and limited VGA) and can emulate a Soundblaster, in other words a good PC. While it couldn't do a 286, a 10 Mhz XT wasn't bad at all during the years it was on the market.
Which rev's are the 2 MBs? There were some fixes added to later rev MB's that fixed some issues with Buster and the expansion bus. Could be the one board either has some bad traces or could have the buster problems. Also, if you have an Amiga external floppy drive, you can plug that into the back of the BridgeBoard and it will act as a PC floppy drive (that's an external floppy drive connector on the Bridgeboard, not a printer port...)
I had this problem back in 1991. I had a A2000 and bought a A2088 bridgeboard. The A2088 would not work initially. I had to take the A2000 to the commodore service center and they updated my motherboard before the A2088 would work.
Hi everyone! Thanks to everyone who pointed out the issue on my first Amiga was the fact my GVP 030 accelerator is configured to fill up the first 8mb of RAM in the 24 bit Zorro II address space. I'm well aware of the limitation of 8mb of RAM there maximum --- but at one point I had been fiddling with the jumpers on that card (for another reason) and I guess I left it set that way. I always assumed it would be using only 32bit memory space for the 12mb of RAM that's on it. DOH! So that'll likely fix it all -- several people confirmed Janus works fine on all versions of Kickstart and with all accelerators. Double DOH!!!!!!!!
The problem with the floppy on the A2088 is that the cable shouldn't have a twist. The A drive is connected internally with a cable without twist, and you can connect an Amiga drive as B: drive on the external connector
Well at least we are getting another vid - lol -.
@@janhofmeier9427 Good one -- I guess they went back to a normal cable on the 286 one. Yeah the original cable and drive is in the machine that I couldn't get working (due to the memory configuration)
@@adriansdigitalbasement yes the A2286 uses a normal cable. IT doesn't have the external connector so both Drives go on the internal.
See my other longer comment for more Details
Also in regards to a graphics card I use an original IBM cga card. I hook the composite out to the composite in on my 1084 and simply use the rgb/composite switch to flip between pc and amiga. Totally awesome. Using a cga card you can play games and applications at full speed. Definitely recommend that. Also a 1084 monitor has digital and analog input as you know already but you cant hook both in at the same time for some reason even though there is an rgb/ttl switch so I use composite as explained. You could put in a 9pin switch box I guess. Ill try that some day and use the switch box to flip back and forth while also toggling the ttl switch (kind of a pain but it works). Try playing with the amouse dos tool and also the tools which allow file copying between the amiga and pc side. Works well also! I actually have a gotek hooked to the bridge card also vs old floppy drive and the controller will read up to 720k disks. The bridge cards actually work great. There is a learning curve though. Check out the replacement for pcwindow which is called viaduct. It will render the Bridgecard onto an rtg graphics card for better color and performance. Totally recommend viaduct.
I'm 13 years old and I really enjoy your videos my favorite old computer is a commodore 64
Same im 14 years old and i enjoy that
@@cristiit7999 That's cool that you guys are into ancient computers. A lot of people are afraid interest will go away as old dudes die.
I agree, nice to see younger people getting into retro computing. 👍
I am also 13 and I love old computers, tech, consoles etc
You are crazy😂
In fairness, nobody with an Amiga in the 1980s was adding a Brodgeboard for graphics or games. It was access to PC business programs, which will run decently in 2 or 4 color modes with MDA the best option.
@@lucasrem What on earth are you whining about? He made a simple observation about why people used a bridge boards back in the '80s. PC games back then were generally graphically and sonically worse than the stuff the Amiga had. PCs were still considered business machines. Grow up.
It's probably different for everyone but I added the bridgeboard to play pc games. I love rpg games and the pc had them all in those days. I added a hard disk (two partitions, so you could use it for both systems) and EGA card as well. I loved my amiga 2000
I played games on my bridgeboard..so not entirely true
Why would anyone add an inferior system to the Amiga. That just doesn't make sense. Amiga was galaxies ahead- Until Commodore killed her with the worst business handling in the history of computers. I would NEVER add a PC card to my beloved girl. Ever!
@@thomasschlitzer7541 Not everyone is you, shocking I know.
Team Retr-o-mat here. We have alot of experience with those cards. If you have any questions about them and problems you cannot solve we are here for you. We are visiting conventions where we are exibitors showing the bridgeboards in action.
I just made 3 partitions and installed Workbench 3.1, Mac OS, and Windows simultaneously to the same hard drive. Added the co-processor chip, and a full size engineering level graphics card for the 486 PC bridgeboard. All platforms available on a 19" Sony Trinitron with separate inputs for each. Adobe suite on the Mac, MS Office and AutoCAD on the PC worked flawlessly.
I think the ’D i A bad’ in the other XT card means also ’Drive A bad’. Really entertaining to watch you work on these bridge boards!
It was. I was shouting at the screen (figuratively).
Came here to post this
I wonder of he needs to connect the FDD to the non twisted connector on the floppy cable on these XT cards for whatever reason
49:38
@@heilong108the commodore pc 10 uses non twisted floppy cables! (=Shugart style) The boot screen of this looks like the old commodore pc too...
I am 65 and remember the wonderful days of MSDOS , I even remember when PCDOS 1.1 first arrived! I was there when CPM was first made available. Oh those were heady times.
I really enjoyed that video - I have a 2286 card in my A2000 as well, and your struggles remind me of mine with that card. First, I can only confirm what others say - it works with either up to 6M RAM on the Zorro bus, or with all extra memory moved to 32 bit space with a 030 accelerator. The card is totally compatible with Kickstart 3.1, so that's definitely no issue.
Regarding the battery issue - I bought a coin-cell battery holder that can replace the type of Lithium battery that came with the A2286 originally, and it works like a charm. No more entering setup when starting the A2286.
What really drove me crazy was to get an IDE controller working on the PC side. This definitely needs a more modern BIOS to work with SD cards or any modern media, but the Janus handlers taking up the D000 address space are a real pain. I was finally able to get it to work with a version of EZ drive, a workaround developed to get past the HD space limitation of early PC controllers. Using this, I could finally get an IDE controller to work on the PC side, and this really makes a difference in speed.
The same is true if you plug in a VGA card - full speed as you would expect it on a 286 PC. Don't worry about the PC Prefs on the Amiga - plugging in a VGA card will totally disable the PC display on the Amiga side. However, you still need to start PC Mono to have the keyboard and mouse signals forwarded to the PC (or you use the keyboard connector on the A2286 to connect a PC keyboard (there's a pin header for connecting a PC keyboard directly to the card, you have to build an adapter yourself, however). You can minimize the window down to a very small size, though.
Bump
Super helpful comments. Thanks!
I had no problem getting a general ISA I/O card IDE adapter to work with an IDE-CF adapter (SD mote often works on IDE adapters). But I needed to use Ontrack Bios overlay software to make a boot record.
No reason to connect a PC keyb. There are commodities on Aminet for swapping with hotkey without running anything visual.
@@remijakobsen1848 Ontrack BIOS overlay software... that just brought back quarter century old memories of my 850mb Maxtor drive 🦕
Note that internally on the bridgeboard, the display is running at full speed. It is the speed of the Amiga copying that PC Bridgeboard display ram to the Amiga chipram which generates that sluggish output. So even if you used a spreadsheet, you were able to cope. Games on the other hand were useless. You would need to plug in a VGA board for that.
Of course, at the time the Amiga native versions of the games tended to be better anyway.
Yeah my guess is that the shared ram is not dual port ram. So the two large PLAs handle swapping that ram back and forth between the Zoro and PC busses. meaning you get, at best, 50% ram performance on both ends. Any processing that STAYS on the PC side should run at full speed though. So, I would assume that, for example, ISA network cards, hard disks, and a video card would run at the same performance as any same spec pc. Mouse and keyboard passing through that shared memory might not be noticibly sluggy, but may want some dedicated solution for gaming there as well. Soooo.. now you have a fully decked out PC, crammed inside your Amiga.
I have always drooled over them back in the day, but their only REAL use is to give the Amiga access to things that were otherwise really expensive on the miggy, like networking, cheaper IDE storage, and "business" software.
Default is MDA mode, 1 bit ANSI text mode is fast enough and what you need for WP and Lotus123. Its a jumper setting on A2088XT.
Note, most A2088XT can run 50% faster just using a DOS command. 7.5 mhz.
As I remember it back in the day the Amiga was generally thought of as a much better gaming machine than the PC's of the day (as it had better graphics and sound than the average CGA based PC with beeper sounds). This means that people who bought these bridge boards generally did so for work purposes, usually word processing and spreadsheets. I think it is worth trying the 286 card with a VGA card as the CGA graphics here looks to be a software emulation rather than a hardware adaptor and as such shouldn't cause a conflict. While there is not much computing power for games on a 286 there were 386 class bridge boards as well which rumour says could be upgraded with a clip on 486 module.
Def true u can make the 286/386 to 486 and there was also the golden gate vortex that had 486 which i upgraded to ibm blue lighting
I can't remember if mine was a 286 or 386 BB, but I bought one of those Cyrix 486SLC clip-on CPUs and it worked great, even though it only had 1K of L1 cache IIRC. Unfortunately I found out the hard way that once you install it, never ever remove it. It came with a small green stick-on heat sink, but obviously got hot enough to make the exposed wires on the clip-on brittle. I can't remember now why I wanted to remove it, but when I did most of the wires for the chip just crumbled. ;-(
I had a 286 daughter card for my A500, and that was my experience. Never bothered to run games. It was mainly so I could do my homework up at college since my professors all required us to use specific DOS-based programs. Worked perfectly for those applications, but you did have to tinker with the memory a bit
@@nicholas_scott sounds like the definitive experience back then, all the perks of a gaming beast and the compatibility for general purpose. How expensive that setup was?
Amazing video as always, Adrian! The BEST part of owning one of these cards was lording it over your PC friends that you could multitask and run their software in the background. It didn't matter that it was slow - the multitasking switch back and forth was enough to make everyone jealous!
I will never get tired of these absolutely massive add-on cards. Something about the size, filled with all those components shoved in makes them look great. You only get those with GPUs nowadays.
Yay I'm glad you were able to use the cards! It's really interesting that you posted this video on the weekend that you did. I had been out of town all weekend on an Amiga rescue mission where I picked up two A4000s and an A2000HD all with battery corrosion damage. If you ever find yourself in Wisconsin I'll make sure to buy you some cheese curds!
Regarding plugging floppy drives in backwards: one of the pins which ends up being selected is the write enable pin, which results in the drive magnetically erasing whichever track the head happened to be looking at at the time. When working with hardware, always remember to remove any valuable floppies before powering on if you're replacing floppy drives!
I ran PC-Task (full software emulation) on my accelerated A1200 and while the screen updates were very slow the actual code (while still slow) ran much better. The best way to mess with people was to run PC-Task (PC emulation) & Shapeshifter (Mac emulation) at the same time. It was great watching peoples minds explode when you showed all of them running at the same time.
Better to run SoftWindows pc emulator in MacOS on your Amiga.
@@remijakobsen1848 Didn't have it at the time (still don't), but it would have been fun to emulate a Mac to emulate a PC while emulating a PC from the Amiga. Although now I think about it, there could be the possibility it would tear open a hole in the universe :-/
@@daishi5571 I tested it yesterday. Softwin is more refined than PC Task. It got graphic drivers in 68k code in Win3.11 that comes with it, so it runs faster than in PCTask.
@@remijakobsen1848 Thats cool. Could you point me in the direction I can get hold of it.
I think the pc card is really cool just to see dos and amiga multitasking between them :D I already knew the downsides of this card, so I was not disappointed when I got it.
In my opinion there is no twist on the floppycable for the XT Card. So if you use the twisted cable your floppy drive will be drive B! So Drive A is bad. Btw i love your Videos i see every video from you. Take up the good work. Greetings from germany.
jumpers can invert the twist. it was only for people who didn't or couldn't set their jumpers.
There was something satisfying about hearing you say "TTL logic", perhaps it's the symmetry it creates since it stands for "transistor-transistor logic logic"
CMOS logic and TTL silence...
I remember working at a few places in the late 80's that had various amigas with bridge boards, and the PC part was mostly used for spreadsheets, Word Perfect or using the corporate PC software, so video update speed wasn't really a big issue. The fact that they were using Amigas in the first place meant that anything with heavy graphic content (CAD, design etc) was being done on the Amiga side.
Love Amigas. Thank you Adrian for featuring all of this older hardware. Commodore forever.
I will say, this was one of the most impressive parts manufactured. An accelerator to drop on top of the processor. Technically impressive, but lost the contract to not being radiation hardened. Also, the brats are safe. They hung for a month before being sent to you.
This low update rate brings back memories from surfing ABBS boards. I remember it was easy to tell if the SysOp was watching your terminal, because it slowed down for each line shift. Lol. Anyway, It is cool having an XT computer running inside the amiga :)
I had a sidecar for my a1000, then a bridge board for my 2000. This was very neat being able to use the ibm hdd with the Amiga etc. and let me do my pc based assignments at the time. Pretty ground breaking at the time that you had two different computer hardware running on the same display etc. good times
as stated last time, configure your gvp card to map the memory all into 32bit space and you should be good, J12 IIRC
Good info on the jumper. I hope Adrian sees this.
The Bridgeboard starts booting when binddrivers is run in startup-sequence.
In the PC side Bridgeboard software, there is an 'atime' tool that will sync the PC clock to the Amiga clock.
The window sometimes only being on half of the screen when you switch resolution is a bug in the Janus 2.1 software. The Janus 2.1 software was technically only for the 2386SX Bridgeboard, but it worked with the XT/AT ones as well (but never shipped with those cards).
The XT card port is a DB23 Floppy connector, you can connect an Amiga drive to it and use it to read PC disks.
My opinion as a cross platform developer today is, if I had to work at this time on a cross platform software for interfacing, industrial or whatever without the ability of virtual machines, this would have been a dream. Also not fiddling around with two machines on one bench and exchanging data with floppies would have been the optimal situtation. Therefore the poor graphics is no problem. Or the other point you mentioned, connecting to a mainframe, where e.g. you only have software for a x86 machine could relief your headaches using an amiga.
Keep going on making such good videos and a happy weekend.
we used Laplink over 232 or printer port back in the day.
for full final guranteed working product, you need real target metal on the bench, VMs can only be trusted so far.
the bridge card was the solution for people who took computer classes in school and had to hand in their homework e.g. in Borland Pascal, TurboC or whatever.
@@Great-Documentaries Exactly. not many students! but some did absolutly not want a native dos machine. (and concerning prices: when you started with HDDs and multisync CRTs, the prices were even higher. in other words: it's a question of priorities)
@@rarbiart Commodore also sold a primitive MDA-only software emulator called Transformer that was good enough if you didn't care about speed or the ability to run anything with graphics.
Video speed - gotta remember, it's having to send across the bus to the Amiga side, get it into the chip ram, then have the amiga side render it... If you use a dedicated video card on the PC side it should be just fine.
@@Great-Documentaries Back in the day you probably would have opted for a CGA or EGA (with 15Khz support) card instead, to avoid having to buy a second monitor (most of the Amiga monitors support digital RGBi as well as the analog RGB for the Amiga). Now though yes obviously VGA would be the better choice, for sure.
Zorro has a Max of 8mb. So your gvp took it all up!
Does that apply to all versions of the Zorro Bus, or only to Zorro II? Just being curious, as I only have an A1200 (with a 4MB RAM + 68881 FPU expansion card), and therefore have no chance of using a bridgeboard ;)
@@BertGrink Zorro I/II yes. Zorro III has 32-bit address space so if you add Z3 cards running in Z3 mode, they should allocate from Z3 space.
There are expansions for the A1200 that will actually let you use a bridgeboard. Most of them are Zorro II only. There was one design that allowed you to use (non-DMA) Zorro III but it required an A3000/A4000 CPU card to allow Z3 to work (since the A1200 expansion port only has 24-bit addressing, but if you put a 32-bit CPU card on the bus expansion then it could bypass this).
@@NozomuYume Thank you for your reply; i was certain that Zorro III was 32-bits, and therefore wouldn´t have such restrictions, but I thought it better to ask.
Also, I am aware that there has been different "big box" expansions for the A1200 which included a motherboard with ZIII, PCI, or both; this has unfortunatly been outside of my financial ability to purchase. Thus my A1200 + RAM/FPU remains my only hardware option.
There´s still emulation, though, where i can have ANY setup i want, something I often indulge in :D
I love SOB cards! (system on a board) My Sun E420R server has the SunPCI III board with a mobile Athlon 1600+ at 1.4GHz. Unlike your ordeal, this just worked perfectly out of the box. And it really is a completely independent computer. I tend to think of that server as a PC surrounded by a full fledged 4x SPARC UNIX machine! As if the PC had caused the UNIX server to come into existence.
On the square sockets, pulling and reseating the chip can make a difference, the cause might be oxidation.
I had a sidekick for a 1000, and it worked, but I can't think of a reason a person would have wanted to run a 286 when they had an Amiga. I still have two AT boards, meant to fit in a 2000, which were installed on two A2000s I purchased. . I pulled them, because I just couldn't find a use for them. One of the boards, has all the chips populated on one main board, and the other, has a daughter board, that mad it a tight squeeze to install a board beside it..
I remember, getting suckered into buying the "new" DOS 5, and remember feeling ripped off. Yeah, the good old days..
The Amiga 1000 version was called the Sidecar and the comnunication driver was called the Janus Handler. Oh they where good days
Good to know the one I sent you helped in the troubleshooting than just the Janus error.
A discrete VGA card and a discrete hard disk were almost a must for users of the BridgeBoards. It was the only way to overcome the Amiga's lack of 256 color support and slow screen updates and slow drive performance on the emulated hard disk partition.
Nowadays companys use Proxmox for VMs to have several virtual machines or develop cross-architecture, but back in the days I think this card was a huge help and saved some space.
I like your videos a lot and have always learned something new. It is as if I would go to my friend's house back in the days when he has gotten something new and we explored it together. Greetings from Germany and keep up the good work.
As a university student I needed a PC/MS DOS for Lotus123 and Borland Turbo Pascal. I upgraded from a stock A500 (which was purely used for games) to the A2000 with the A2088 bridgeboard with an MFM PC hard drive which was split so the Amiga could use it too. SCSI hard drives for the Amiga were just way too expensive. The Amiga couldn't boot from it, but once the PC software was started it worked fine. As this was my first PC/computer with a hard drive it was a major upgrade and a lot faster than using floppy disks. Buying a separate PC with a monitor would have cost a lot more.
The window mode is so you can minimise the fullscreen view and keep the DOS view in a window while using workbench
Thanks for the light show. It is inevitable that mistakes are going to happen, I am glad that no serious damage was done to the card. That is a neat trick to determine the faulty cap that is in line with other caps on the same circuit.
Sorry, that was meant to go on the last video of yours I watched, where you blew up an tantalum capacitor.
I may have a newer Janus.library, it's still there A4000 backup's on WinUAE, though it cant do anything there.
Just a note: I had Comodore's 386SX Bridgeboard working on my A3000 and A4000 with kickstart 3.0/3.1 if I remember correctly. There was a patch for the janus library you need to get for all the bridgeboards to run in 3.x, though is may be described only for the 386 model, it should work for all bridgeboards.
I'm willing to send a copy out, though it will be inside a .hdf file with the full Janus PC install on the HD as files, not. the original install disks.
It still totally amazes me that ASICs reduced this vast constellation of chips to one or two in latter day network cards! I remember so well chassis-spanning token ring cards that cost a fortune in the early days of office networks! I was certain that token ring was the future! And ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) was next!
They might have been, had we not invented switched ethernet.
The PC world is rife with "good enough", cheap, and short term solutions that had higher priced, better designed competitors that were predicted to someday overtake the cheap solution do to better design.
What actually happened though was that Moore's law took over, and the "better design" lost to just shoving silicon at the more popular and cheaper first solution. That's how we got ethernet over everything else, and x86 over the predicted rise of RISC chips.
IBM tried the same thing with the better designed (but proprietary and controlled by IBM) MCA bus to replace the ISA bus. The clone makers fought back, and designed EISA, and later on something actually decent, PCI. Microchannel was a much better design than just modifying ISA a bit, and had auto-config of IO and IRQ built in. It took until PCI for the clones to get that.
@@stevesether Obviously you were there :)
I remember my dad literally bought the Amiga 1000 because of the existence of these IBM bridge-boards. He thought he would be able to use it to bring work stuff home and have the best of both worlds, but ALAS it was a huge disappointment straight out of the box and was never used for its intended purpose. Before long we had a real PC and an Amiga sitting side by side.
I think for the POST card to work on the 286 bridge card it would have to be connected directly to it. I think that because if the bridge card is in the main board expansion slot, the post card should be responding to the Amiga main board, not the 286 bridge.
I had an A2000 with kickstart 1.3 and a Bridgeboard 386SX - 16 Mhz in the early 90's. I didn't experience the kinds of the software bugginess you had in your video, so I guess the kickstart version might have something to do with it. The motherboard had all 16 bit ISA connectors except 1 that was 8 bit. I simply soldered in the missing connector and used a VGA - card in it. It really made a big improvement for the display performance of my Bridgeboard. I think the VGA - card just worked without any fiddling with the software and I used to play pc - games with the Bridgeboard before selling my Amiga and moving to 486DX2-66.
When softeeset pc in video, Amiga freezes a few sec, its not hanging. He just rebooted before he noticed it had not hung.
Hello from Wisconsin! I love your videos. I've been plowing through them. I love listening to you troubleshoot computers. I'm an electronics nerd, who has just been learning how it all works through osmosis over the years, so I've learned a lot from your videos. I regularly repair very basic audio electronics, but I'm like a Caveman with a lighter most of the time, just fiddling around trying to fix things. Thanks for what you do! I've used some of your affiliate links to buy some more gear for my repairs, I hope that helps.
Ahh the video toaster - had so much fun with that in the early 90’s. We had a Panasonic “M2” format vtr that could record 1 frame (or more for lower FPS) from lightwave - it would take a few seconds to a minute to render a frame, then the vtr would rewind a bit, play, and record that frame (the rec light would briefly flicker too), and then wait for the Amiga to finish the next frame. Would have a nice little animation… the next morning!
This, "remove the card, insert it again" and the "reset button" are 2 things showing how complex a computer is. Really great piece of engineering, yet so complex that it's better to stop, clean and start again.
You don't need to physically swap ROMs to run a different Kickstart version; use something like ReloKick to load a different version into RAM and you're good to go. (And as everyone else has pointed out, your accelerated machine is eating all the address space.)
I had a 3rd party 486 'Bridgeboard' with VGA and it worked very well indeed.
Vortex golden gate 486 ??
As far as I know, those bridge boards need 512k autoconfig memory space and your gvp accelerator occupies the whole 8m, the bridgeboard is thus not configured by amigaos, and thats why sysinfo shows "size=0k". Remove some ram from your accelerator or move the ram out of 24bit memory space, to get enough free space in the autoconfig area...
I used a similar ( smaller ) card in the AtariST called AT Speed and used it for BlueWave, a BBS email reader. Also I ran Windows3 and some other DOS/Win only stuff. Was a small board that fits on the CPU and shared memory with the ST. The back and forth switching, keeping the RAM status on the ST system was just very awesome. It was both hardware emulation and virtualisation.
I used to run these with a separate VGA-card and that improved the speed quite noticeably!
Then again I used to compare the speed with my original PC and then this wasn't too bad!
The second Amiga has the HDD and power LEDs reversed.
Also, beware of having a floppy disc in a disc drive while the floppy cable is reversed; it often ruins the software on the disc completely.
I used to use one of those XT cards in an Amiga 1000, it was painfully slow and equally painfully buggy. I feel for you. Remember, I was doing all this when the gear was new and with docs.
I had quite the thrill listening to my cylinder recordings on my 8 track machine just last week.
OLD sockets sockets sockets. Always a good idea to pop the chips and reseat on these old cards.. I've owned alot of these bridgeboards,they are fairly reliable,except for battery leaks on the 2386 cards. i have always used these on 3.1 roms with no trouble. You can use a external amiga drive on the external bridgeboard 23pin connector as a PC floppy. hardfiles are painfully slow,a real drive helps for the pc side. adding a vga card also helps since video etc is being pushed thru the zorro2 buss at a max of 3.5MB/s(if that!)
Use EIDE-CF adaptor rather than physical HD.
Gotta love these old PCs.
_The current time is 9:105 and 15 seconds, of the year 10001_
(38:10)
Janus's display is sampled and reconstructed as a planar image. It's the major bottleneck for all the Bridgeboards. But it was good enough to run productivity apps, which is why we all used them.
A few things come to mind
1. The A2065 networks cards are still very usefull, even without the adapter, you could run a coax network between the two cards.
2. Regarding the issue with sdcard and A2091 it could be related to the WD scsi controller chip on the A2091 most of those cards are born with a rev 3 or rev 4 of the WD33C93A chip which is know to have issues with "scsi disconnects" and since the sdcard is removeable then it probably utilizes disconnects (just thinking out loud on this one - no familiar with the particular adapter you use). For the least issues / best performance a combination of rev 8 scsi chip, guru rom, and 14mhz speed mod is kinda the goto combo for the A2091.
3. The slow graphics speed is kinda what you would expect - all the graphics has to be transfered through the bridgeboard and through zorro II and then through the onboard amiga agnus into the chip ram before finally being displayed by denise... and somewhere along the way it has to be converted from chunky to planar graphics - not sure if this happen in the custom asic's, or on the 68k cpu/janus library or at what step but it just HAS to be slow by design... dedicated vga card/multi monitor must be the way to go. I wonder if it would help with a RTG (chunky enabled) zorro II graphics card (doubt janus software supports direct to rtg but maybe someone patched it).
4. Any thoughts on overclocking the 286 i.e. with that 20mhz 286 chip you have ?
Excellent detail on this video... very good work, sir!
Back when I had an A500 I actually remember running a DOS software emulator which had a clock speed of something ridiculous like 0.1Mhz.
2:45 When I first went to work for an ISP in the mid-1990s, I was confused why almost all of our networking equipment had 10Base-5 ports, despite the fact it was almost entirely obsolete, in the face of 10Base-2 and 10Base-T(X). (We actually found a 10Base-5 segment with a vampire tap one day in 1997 or 1998, hidden under a false floor, and were surprised by it -- nobody still working there knew it was there!) It was cheaper to provide a 10Base-5 interface, instead of both 10Base-2 and 10Base-T, and 10Base-5 incidentally provided power to the port, which could power a transceiver to your choice of interface, instead of needing an external power supply. And if you were spending several thousand dollars on a piece of equipment, the cost of a transceiver was negligible. That said, it was much more common for consumer equipment of the time to come with anywhere from one to three of those interfaces.
Bought my Amiga 1000 2 weeks after it came out, with the rumor that some PC OS software was being made, so 2 weeks after I bought the Amiga 1000 the Transformer Software package came out, bought it, and ran the PC Software Lotus 123, Dbase, Word Perfect, and other types of office software, since I was doing Lotus 123 and Dbase programming using macro's, it got me through the year with what I needed to do. A little bit slower, but good enough to do my work at home when my Otrana carry computer went and broke. By the way it is great seeing a person who knows how to run a Amiga and Dos. I used the Amiga Transformer and PC-task. both ran well on an Amiga, but when I put it on an Amiga Emulator on today's PC, they actually run faster then the boards and emulators made for an Amiga.
Everybody loved A1000 with Commodore Sidecar !
The 8088 card shipped with a 5.25 floppy drive and a straight cable -- no twisty. That is what you tried on the 1st Amiga, but because of the GVP card you moved to the second Amiga. On the second Amiga you used a 3.5 floppy drive and connected it to the twisty end. What happens if you connect a 5.25 to the straight end. Also, you didn't seem to notice in the video, but the Drive A Fail happened on both your 8088 cards; that was the fail message you were seeing corrupted by the ram problem on the second card, which is what makes me think you have a cabling problem.
It shouldn't be just any 5.25 floppy drive, it should be a 360KB 5.25 floppy drive :-)
great video! helped me a lot getting my A2088XT working on my 2000!!!
Janus is such a great name for it as Janus was the god of door ways and transitions, haha.
Have you tried connecting the floppy drive to the "B" connector (without the twist)? It's been a long time since I've seen one of those in the flesh, but I seem to remember it was a straight cable without twist (of course the floppy could be jumpered to the other ID...).
Shame he didn't realise all 3 cards had the same floppy problem, ie, highly unlikely 3 cards have the exact same fault, so your cable idea is probably right.
I thought the same. with the twist make the floppy drive bootable. and that is why it could not boot.
A2088 int port is for 5.25 360kb drive, no twist. B: is port in rear for Amigs ext floppy, getting 720kb
Looking back, its amazing that people had in their hands a graphics and music wonder computer yet the motivation was to scramble into geting MS-DOS on their Amigas! Shows the power of having killer apps.
I mean, the number of amiga users who added bridgeboards was pretty small. But there certainly was a market for them. If you already owned an amiga 2000, the bridgeboard was way cheaper than buying a whole additional 286, and way more convenient on the desk.
Nearly every Amiga user who bought it to play games was on an A500 for cost reasons.
Almost fifty on my personal gauge, still big sentiment to Commodore Amiga.. I had three, 500, 600, 1200 Tower. Still have a bunch of floppy discs, (most of them stored in my PC). Beautiful times, lot of nostalgia...
Greets from Poland - from automation engineer.
I had the 286 bridgeboard on my Amiga 2000, back in the day (I didn't have an accelerator, just stock Amiga 2000) when I was a college student (low-budget gaming/development box). I used an 8-bit MFM HD controller with a 30MB Kalok drive on the 286-side, partitioned 10MB for the 286, 20MB for the Amiga, I had to boot the Amiga side on floppy, custom script to start the bridgeboard, then wait for about 45 seconds, then it would mount the 286's hard-drive back to the amiga, and run the rest of the workbench startup from the hard drive. I also had a 16-bit VGA card on the 286-side, and a second monitor on top of a plank I put across the top of the Amiga 2000 case, to support the 2 CRTs side-by-side. The hot-key on amiga keyboard would switch between which system was being typed into. I could even run VGA DOS games, since had the dedicated hardware for the video. Add in the MAC emulator software, and could have Mac running in a window on the Amiga side, the 286 running MS-DOS in it's monitor on the left monitor... all 3 running at once in real-time speed (no emulation, aside from video mapping for the Mac). This setup let me use a cheap IBM-compatible hard-drive on my Amiga, instead of the overpriced SCSI drives that were typically used on Amiga and Mac at the time.
Adrian, I noticed when testing the 286 board, you skipped passed the "Display Task Priority" option in the pulldown menus. Did you ever go back and test the highest "10" priority setting?
The GoldenGate 386 and 486 bridgeboards were pretty amazing pieces of kit; I wish I'd had a big box Amiga and one of those. I could've justified holding on to the Ami a little longer then.
Some die-hards still use 2000s, 3000s and 4000s with ISA SBCs that are still made with modern systems on them - dual- and quad-core systems, tons of RAM, that could emulate the native Amiga faster than the Amiga itself! But I appreciate the effort! But, as they're SBCs and not Bridgeboards, unlike the 2086, 2088, and 2286 (and Golden Gate '386 and '486 cards), they're not accessible from the Amiga side as easily as the older ones.
Re: A2065 network cards - please support development of brand new Amiga software by buying a license if the Roadshow TCP/IP stack 🙂. It's 100% compatible with the A2065, maintained with updates dropping every now and then and written by AmigaOS developer Olaf 'Olsen' Barthel. While you're at it, please also consider upgrading your Amiga 2000 to the brand new AmigaOS 3.2, one of the biggest AmigaOS updates for legacy Amigas so far 👍.
53:00 Hi Adrian, having had a bridgeboard since 1990, my experience is as you found: the software based screen on the Amiga just stinks. It works fine, even with an XT bridgeboard, to just throw a VGA card in a PC slot.
That is what I did for my #DOScember (2020) on the Amiga project. Peace.
Love the Amiga stuff, very interesting. I must dig out my A1500 from the back of the loft, but I fear the varta has probably killed it by now. Great video as usual Adrian, keep up the great work.
So did the varta killed it? Just wondering…
I started my ICT career with an Amiga 1200 and a 286 card that sat on top of the processor. I had to run dBase software. I have been an Amiga fan all those years!
If no one has mentioned it, check out VIADUCT. Its an enthusiast version of the PC software for the bridgeboard.
Could I recommend you put a date on your post its, or some sort sort of episode number to refresh your memory when you revisit items?
back in the day, I think it was about 1989, I had a mate who designed and built his own 386 bridgeboard with 1MB RAM for his A2000, this was when at the time 286 bridgeboards were really the only ones you could afford. I told him he should have mass produced it and made some $$$ but he wasnt interested, for him it was more about the challenge to do it.
Yep had one of these installed in my Amiga 2000 in the early 90s.
I had the 2000 with the AT bridgeboard. Sent it back within a couple of weeks as although I liked the hardware on the Amiga side, the AT side was so flakey, and I needed a PC specifically for my educational needs. Ended up getting a PC instead, and no Amiga again for nearly 30 years!
I would have absolutely loved this as a kid. An Amiga AND the ability to work in DOS? Hell yeah!
Emulators worked fine back in the day, trouble was people not on BBSes had to rely on consumer magazines, only ones such as Byte and PCW would do the technocall articles.
the best bridge card was buying an additional Commodore PC aside...
To answer your questen there have been Amiga 5.25" Floppys they usually had a switch on the backside to select 40/80 Tracks. They stored 440KB/880KB(1:1 3.5"). This drives have been Double Density not High Density. So it could read/write PC 360KB Floppys and and 720KB that was seldom used on PC atleast on 5.25".
@Adrian's Digital Basement Bridgeboards from Commadore used RAM of middle to low quality, I find. As a precaution, I always replaced all the RAM chips with compatible chips from a manufacturer that has a consistent quality I trust and put in double wipe sockets for future repair. I also re-capped them, including any solid-states, with all solid-state caps, as a way to make them last longer and to fix some of the IC issues. Those ICs are very picky about the current they get.
This is the kind of basement I need. Thanks, Adrian.
Hi,
I've added the two 16bit missing parts of the ISA slots on my A2000 and with my A2386 they work fine
I've also added a 16bit vga and a sound blaster with no problems.
I think there was a 386 bridgeboard... I also remember a 286 on a card for the A500 that fit in I think a GVP slot
Used my bridge card to run a bbs off of it for the amiga. Had an ibm harddrive controller and vga card installed along with a monitor dedicated to the pc side of things. Was great fun at the time. Ran with an Emplant card for Apple Mac OS as well. Made all my friends jealous. Lol
Brings back memories. Those cards were buggy as hell. I swear I lost months trying to get them working properly back in the day.
I own all the Commodore Bridgeboards and a Golden Gate 486sx and I'm somewhat of an expert. I have repaired these at the PCB level. The Commodore hardware and software requires some specific steps to set it up. Remove all other cards as well. Plug in a PC speaker and you will hear the Commodore 'chirp' when the Amiga reads Binddrivers in the startup-sequence. Use the Commodore utilities disk to create a HDD partition on an Amiga HDD (adisk). The XT card only works with a 360k FDD using a proper Commodore cable that does NOT have a twist. The DB25 on the back of the XT card is for an Amiga A1010 FDD which will give a 720k B: drive. You should also plug in a VGA card which runs quite well, especially with an A2630 accelerator. Fumbling around like you have been doing is not the way forward. The answer is pretty simple. RTFM....
I've had 2x A2286 and 4x A2088 getting 'issues'. recap didn't help.
Typical hardware fails? Any IC to check?
@@remijakobsen1848 check the ram on the card. there is the PC-side RAM (640k etc) and there's also some shared RAM that the Amiga uses to talk to the PC side. schematics are available for the commodore cards, check it. I've been repairing arcade boards for ~25 years and RAM is the number 1 failed part on everything.
also, the A2286 has issues with open vias. if you look on your a2286 daughterboard you will find some jumper wires. mine has several and it got even more when I took it into an official commodore repair shop back in about 1990. they can be fixed by referencing the schematics and checking all connections with a multimeter. it can take months/years but it can be fixed as long as the special custom chips are not bad.
@@johnbos4637 RAM chips is OK ok these boards it seems. I've repaired many computers with bad RAM chips, PET, ZX, C64, C128, TRS80 and more...
@@remijakobsen1848 shared ram is soldered in and must be removed and tested with something like a Retro ChipTester Pro. Logic can go bad too. Custom chips can go bad or the custom chips in sockets need to be removed, cleaned and re-seated. connections with sockets to chip is also a big problem. If you are repairing old stuff you need an RCT. I built a couple for myself, it's a very very nice thing for checking tens of thousands of different chips.
Add the 2 extra connectors for the 2 last slots. That would be an awesome video and addition to that amazing Amiga.
I guess I was rich because I had a A2386 with a VGA card on a 3000. I was fully loaded on that system. It took me through college, I ran DOS software on it and did my word processing on the Amiga side.
I am fighting with the same Janus error message here. Trying another A2000 is a valuable hint, which I have to try out. Cheers! I hope the performance improves when you limit the traffic that has to travel across the shared mem. That’s said to be a bottle neck. So an IDE ctrl and a vga card will hopefully help.
Just re-visiting this video as I just recently purchased an A2286AT Similar to what you have, I soldered in the two extra sockets to give me two more 16-bit ISA slots and have a Trident VGA card and a soundblaster 16 card... VGA I've tested and it works great in a two monitor setup, doesn't have the screen delay and such. I still haven't loaded into DOS as for some reason the FDD settings get set back to default due to the BIOS forgetting what it's doing. My A2286 card has a DALLAS 1287 RTC Module with integrated battery that failed, just purchase a coin cell drop in replacement and hopefully that will get me working with this.
When the hardware goes along (also add-on cards, and maybe a faster/cooler CPU is necessary) you can bump up the A2286 bridgeboard speed to more than 11MHz. Also Kingston 386-like-upgrade is possible swapping out the 286-CPU. Bottleneck to Amiga-side remains largely unchanged, of course.
I had trouble with a Transcend brand CF card in my Amiga. HDToolbox shows it, allows it to be partitioned, and save changes. Next reboot it will either appear like it is blank or it will have checksum errors after formatting with fastfilesystem and eventually just cause a crash. It causes no issues on a PC with fat formating. It took hours of searching online to find out that some transcend memory just doesn't play nice with Amiga partitions so you might try another SD card in your SCSI adapter.
That shouldn't really be an issue with a SCSI to SD adapter. The issue with CF Cards is they actually use a straight IDE interace internally, but some of them don't support the full IDE command set and are missing support for some of the more obscure commands that never get used on a PC but the Amiga IDE controllers need them. At least that's my understanding of it.
These bridgeboards were for the rich people, buying an A2000 and a Bridgeboard was a lot of money. But it wasn't the best solution. The KCS PowerPC board was a far better Amiga PC compatibility solution. First, it is compatible with the most popular Amiga, the 500, which means it was affordable for mere mortals. It was also more usable, it has faster screen updates, emulates everything up to EGA (and limited VGA) and can emulate a Soundblaster, in other words a good PC. While it couldn't do a 286, a 10 Mhz XT wasn't bad at all during the years it was on the market.
Looked like both cards had the same floppy drive error.
Which rev's are the 2 MBs? There were some fixes added to later rev MB's that fixed some issues with Buster and the expansion bus. Could be the one board either has some bad traces or could have the buster problems.
Also, if you have an Amiga external floppy drive, you can plug that into the back of the BridgeBoard and it will act as a PC floppy drive (that's an external floppy drive connector on the Bridgeboard, not a printer port...)
I had this problem back in 1991. I had a A2000 and bought a A2088 bridgeboard. The A2088 would not work initially. I had to take the A2000 to the commodore service center and they updated my motherboard before the A2088 would work.