a45@mindlink.UUCP (Ken Cooper) (01/22/90)
I've spent the last several months building up my system. I have an Amiga A2000 with GVP's 4Mb 030 board. Then a 286 BridgeBoard. All the slots on the PC side are already filled. I still have two other boards that are NEEDED on the PC side. I've tried a hack whereby taking a dead XT motherboard, cut it in half and ending up with 5 XT slots. All backside traces were cut. I then attached a card edge near one XT slot and soldered up 62 wires. This new board was inserted into the leftmost PC slot, with the 5 XT slots facing away from the Amiga. It just about worked. At some point I realized that one of the boards already on the PC side had to go on this extended bus. It has an AT connector, so now I'm going to have to start over again and find a dead AT motherboard (or something cleaner) and try the same thing. It will be faster the second time around :) Unless... Someone (maybe the tech guys at CBM?) knows whether or not my new plan would work. Perhaps there is an existing AT bus extender that I could just buy? I'm not adverse to cutting a hole in the side (I've already cut a hole in the top of my case to add a whisper fan to help keep the boards cool. Yes I know I can go tomorrow and buy a PC with lots of slots, however I have a 4Mb ATVista board with 4Mb VMX, 4Mb AST Rampage multi-function board, a GPIB board for use with a Howtek 35mm slide scanner on the PC side, and ImageLink and Caligari Broadcast Rendering software on the Amiga side. All these tools work together in the Amiga. I can finally make and transfer 24 bit Turbo Silver ray-tracings to the Vista Board. I have TIPS, RIO and SCAN-IT, so there is a lot of graphics power available to create images (I produce special effect photographs). Has anyone already tried to extend the bus on the PC side? Anything to watch out for? Is it possible? Currently the VMX and GPIB boards are sitting on the other table waiting to go to work. Ken Cooper Vancouver, BC. (604) 681-2522 CIS: 73627,2334