AMIGA aktuell international forum

7. Proposal for the connection of an old with a new Amiga (by Detlef Baranski)

»In the following there are several statements, ideas and proposals, about which I'd like to learn your opinions concerning their usability and their possibility of realisation.

The platform Amiga/DraCo basing upon the 68xxx processor is more or less history by now. New hardware is imminent and existing harware like PCs off the market already have come to stay in the graphics sector due to their clearly higher working speed. The new owners of Amiga also will introduce a new operating system. Thus an Amiga/Draco user of long standing is now or later forced to make up his mind about changing to another system. Lots of users already have switched over or work on different platforms. But why do some still use the old 68k computer? Because over the years they became used to the handling of it and of the old applications and with the change of programs theyd'd have to throw over board all of their experiences. The extreme case is the DraCo with Movieshop - most users do not wish to be without it - but the speed of recent hardware baits.

IMHO the new owners of Amiga are aware of problems involved and try to achieve a floating transfer to the new system with help of a 68k emulation to make the old valuable software run on new machines. But a combination of software/hardware like Vlab-Motion and Movieshop then are left aside.

However the solution could be as follows:

A software/harware combination merging the old one with the new world - similar to Siamese. The connection of Amiga/DraCo with a PC resp. the NG hardware! Those attempts ar not really new - similar solutions were tried with the PC/AT board for the Amiga 2000 or the Siamese system - but they were not completed. An example being well appraised among professionals might be the combination of DraCo and PC. The deficiency of the DraCo is an up-to-date graphical resolution for Movieshop, because the graphics board only has a bandwidth of 130 MHz. If instead of the graphics board a hardware adaptor could be inserted into the DraCo slot, which deviates the graphics to a PC and displays it there and additionally makes calculations and render jobs possible on the faster hardware, this certainly would be a solution welcomed by many users of digital video. It might be th association of the best parts out of two worlds. And even more possibilities can be imagined ...

The questions arise, if there is sufficient demand and if there is a manufacturer to jump on the bandwagon?

And what are the technical possibilities and how are they to be realized? Zorro-2 to PCI bridge, Fast Ethernet, virtual RAM memory mirrored into the PC ...?

In a way it is up to Amiga Inc. to supply this possibility for us ;-)

Please give me your oppinion.

Detlef Baranski <draco-faq@gmx.de>«