!!! AMIGA 1000 MULTI-FUNCTION CARD !!! ======================================== What is it? ----------- EXPANSION SYSTEMS has developed the first stand alone fully featured Amiga expansion card. The X-1000 board provides the Amiga with 1/2 Mb fast RAM, a battery backed clock, up to four extra programmable DMA channels, and a very high speed SCSI interface. All this runs off the Amiga's internal supply and sits quietly and unobtrusively in an extruded aluminium case just behind the mouse ports. At the rear of the case is an industry standard centronics connector for any SCSI disk, tape, optical drive, CD-ROM or future device. Why Multi-function? ------------------- Add-on boards for the Amiga have been around for a while now in various styles. Our designers looked at these cards and found them lacking. Mostly they seem to offer a large chunk of RAM and nothing else, or alternatively a 20Mb hard disk in an unwieldy box. While some of them do offer a pass through connector there is still some doubt as to which product will work with which other product. In the world of IBM PCs the trend has been towards large multi-function cards. This approach gives the user everything on one PCB - saving slot space and minimising compatability problems. We think this is the correct approach with the Amiga as well. Build one expansion board that does everything and avoid the expansion problems. How does it work? ----------------- The features provided by the X-1000 board have been carefully engineered to boost the performance of the Amiga as a system! This is important. If you simply increase the memory capacity of your computer you end up with a system which is unbalanced - it performs well for some applications but most don't really need that much RAM. The first 1/2 Mb of Fast RAM will have a dramatic effect on Amiga performance. The best performance increase is obtained by having extra memory AND a fast hard disk AND dma AND a clock. On the X-1000 these features have been designed to work together and to work well. To DMA or not to DMA? --------------------- There has been some debate over the wisdom of including DMA in Amiga hard disk designs. We beleive that hardware should be as fast as available technology will allow to maximise performance and to provide scope for improvement as the product matures. Because we use DMA for disk transfers the X-1000 interface supports an interleave factor of 1:1 for any disk - ST-506, RLL, ESDI, SCSI. And, while the DMA controller is reading the disk at a lightning pace, it only needs about 30% of the 68K bus bandwidth - leaving the CPU free to compute in parallel with the disk transfer. This design doesnt tie up the CPU during disk transfers. The board will accept Motorola's 2 or 4 channel DMA controllers providing up to three spare channels (one is permanently assigned to the SCSI port) which may be programmed as simple blitter channels with access to both chip and fast RAM. The scope for software enhancements using this card is enormous. The Amiga File System? ---------------------- We are currently working on new driver software for the X-1000 which uses some of the spare hardware facilities to dramatically improve hard disk performance. The technique we are using is known as Predictive Cacheing. This simply means that when AmigaDos requests disk data we anticipate where the next request will be and get it before Amigados asks for it. One DMA channel may be transferring data from cache to Amigados while the other is simultaneously reading blocks from disk. The Clock? ---------- If you are thinking of running a hard disk you need a clock calendar for date stamping files. Not to mention all those other programs that like to know the time of day. Where does the hard disk go? ---------------------------- The SCSI interface is specified to run up to 20' - so put the hard disk and its power supply out of the way. Quite a few companies offer stand alone SCSI drives these days and they can be any size! The X-1000 SCSI interface will connect to any size hard disk. To make you feel like the hard drive is right on the desk with you, we have put a LED at the front of the X-1000 which lights whenever an SCSI transfer is in progress. This effectively emulates the LED on the front of the real hard disk drive. More flashing lights? --------------------- As well as the LED for disk emulation, we have included a second LED in the design. This LED is illuminated whenever the fast RAM is accessed. This provides a simple "Fast Ram Usage" indicator. What does it look like? ----------------------- The board (6 layer PCB) fits in an extruded aluminium case 35mm x 150mm x 235mm. The front is a polycarbonate plate with silk screening on the inner side. The PCB mounted SCSI connector pokes out the back through a light guage aluminium panel. The whole box is about the size of a half height winchester drive. Is it vapourware? ----------------- The X-1000 went to beta test in late march 87 and is in production now. X-1000 SPECIFICATIONS Design Single multi-layer PCB 9" x 5.5" Case Colour matched aluminium extrusion with silk screened LEXAN front panel Power 1A @ 5V supply from Amiga 86 pin expansion port Technology TTL, MOS and HCMOS Auto-Config All functions auto configure - RAM and SCSI and CLOCK RAM 512K fast RAM - 0 wait states CLOCK Battery backed Intersil clock/calendar SCSI SCSI host adapter with bidirectional 2 byte FIFO supports transfers to 1Mb/sec. Interrupt on end of data phase. Industry standard 50 way centronics PCB mounted connector DMA Motorola 68440/450 controller with 1 channel assigned to SCSI remaining channels free. Max transfer rate 3.6 Mb/sec Software Clock software, SCSI drivers to support common devices.