Seems very cool, I have no experience with Amiga- what is actually being emulated? Seems like it’s mostly real hardware and the software is just providing a passthru to it. The amiga and pc add-in board share an ISA bus?

CPU is not emulated, the card got a real 80286. Today, people use emulation about emulating cpu in software, back then these kind of card was always refered to as emulator cards.

The card got a memory buffer for communicating with the Amiga side for sharing resources like clipboard, files, RTC, keyboard, LPT port. MDA and CGA graphics can be emulated on Amiga screen, hard drive can be emulated using an image file on an Amiga partition.

Amiga don't use ISA directly, but got its own Zorro slots. All big box Amiga's starting with Amiga 2000 got inactive ISA slots, for purpose of these cards, the emulator card is connected to Amiga Zorro slot and an ISA slot, connecting directly to the other ISA slots.

The original Amiga from 1985, Amiga 1000 doesn't have internal expansion, so the PC emulator connected to the expansion slot on the left side and was a big box, the A1060. THe emulator came with ISA slots, MFM harddrive and 5.25" floppy drive internally.

Nice setup, years ago I had an A4000 with a goldengate486slc2 setup, it was a good combo 😀

Thanks! Yes, Goldengate 486 is on my wishlist, also the Commodore A2386 which can be easy upgraded to 486lc@75mhz.

Nice! I have a very similar setup. An A2000 with an A2286, and I've also soldered in the 16-bit expansions on the 8-bit ISA slots. The PC side has an ATi Mach 32 VGA card with bus mouse port, an ESS1688 sound card and an NE2000 clone 10Mbps network card. I've got the XT-IDE BIOS burned to an EPROM that sits in the boot prom socket of the network card. I've connected a 4GB CF card to the secondary IDE port on the sound card and it boots DOS 6.22 off that.

There is a MASSIVE difference in speed if you use real hardware, rather than the CGA emulation to the Amiga's display and using a hardfile on the Amiga's HDD, the hardfile and CGA are catastrophically slow. I struggled to get a hardfile working when I first got my A2286 and went the hardware route rather. Only much later did I discover that the hardfile can only work on an FFS partition, my HDD had PFS3 partitions on it.

The main reason I bought the A2286 was so that I could get networking on the A2000 by sharing the network card via the A2286. It was quite a challenge getting everything working properly, but now she hums along nicely. It's nice to multitask Amiga and PC on the same machine, even more amusing when playing the PC version and Amiga version of the same game at the same time!!

This is a post from long ago where I discussed using the XT-IDE BIOS in my A2000 with the A2286 bridgeboard.

Re: Large IDE drives on 286/AT/ISA class machines

I did not get the XT-IDE Bios visable on my setup, so I am currently using this:

- A2286 8Mhz (no 10 or 12Mhz Hack)
- ET4000 1MB 1024x768@256 Colors
- Formosa SC1630 ESS Soundcard with primary! IDE Interface 8Gb CF-Card Ontrack DM957
- Etherlink III Network-Card

Doc

Great setup, I've spent some hours myself getting everything working. Also ended up with SYS/DH0 on Amiga using FFS, I think only the SYS/boot disk needs to be FFS, hardfile can still be placed on PFS. Anyway, you can setup an Amiga partition with 3rd party driver on AmiNet, and it will increase specially write speed a bit, but seek speed is still way to slow, making Windows 3.1 useless, but not affecting game so much.

Another tip that you might now after all hours with setup: Hardfile is same format as PCTask and can be setup by PCTask. Hardfile can be accessed directly in AmigaOS if mounted using CrossDOS.
You can use the very latest version of software on both PC and Amiga side for the A2286, that came with only the A2386 card.
Someone made a new "Terminal" for CGA on Amiga side suitable for RTG graphic cards, its on Aminet.
There are some useful tools on Aminet, for example software so you can swap keyboard using a hotkey.

One important thing that I struggled hours to find out, I need to start binddrivers command in startup-sequence, before setpatch command for A2286 to work with janus handler.

I do not use a hardfile because of two reasons:
1. WAY TO SLOW
2. BEEP on PC-SPK WHEN ACESS to HARDFILE

I have connected the PC-SPK to my Soundcard because I would like to hear sbx (pouet.net)

Doc

setpatch command is for what purpose?

In SYS;S/startup-sequence on Amiga, setpatch is ran when booting to patch bugs in Kickstart ROM and Amiga OS.
The beep in PC speaker on my system, when I used hardfile, was only played when starting Windows 3.11, not for other stuff, strange.

Every access to the hardfile makes a beep on mine.

Strange, maybe the beep is alarm for something timing out with hard drive access. Hard file is OK for me except Windows, and no beeps except for Windows.
Don't use FFS partition for hard file, I think I use PFS, but my boot SYS partition needed to be FFS for janus.handler to work though. A small improvement, specially for "write" when using a dedicated partition on Amiga side instead of hard file, because it doesn't go through Amiga filesystem to access data then.

But of course, only dedicated controller is the real deal.

orcish75 wrote on 2019-03-26, 21:37:

Nice! I have a very similar setup. An A2000 with an A2286, and I've also soldered in the 16-bit expansions on the 8-bit ISA slot […]
Show full quote

Nice! I have a very similar setup. An A2000 with an A2286, and I've also soldered in the 16-bit expansions on the 8-bit ISA slots. The PC side has an ATi Mach 32 VGA card with bus mouse port, an ESS1688 sound card and an NE2000 clone 10Mbps network card. I've got the XT-IDE BIOS burned to an EPROM that sits in the boot prom socket of the network card. I've connected a 4GB CF card to the secondary IDE port on the sound card and it boots DOS 6.22 off that.

There is a MASSIVE difference in speed if you use real hardware, rather than the CGA emulation to the Amiga's display and using a hardfile on the Amiga's HDD, the hardfile and CGA are catastrophically slow. I struggled to get a hardfile working when I first got my A2286 and went the hardware route rather. Only much later did I discover that the hardfile can only work on an FFS partition, my HDD had PFS3 partitions on it.

The main reason I bought the A2286 was so that I could get networking on the A2000 by sharing the network card via the A2286. It was quite a challenge getting everything working properly, but now she hums along nicely. It's nice to multitask Amiga and PC on the same machine, even more amusing when playing the PC version and Amiga version of the same game at the same time!!

This is a post from long ago where I discussed using the XT-IDE BIOS in my A2000 with the A2286 bridgeboard.

Re: Large IDE drives on 286/AT/ISA class machines

Interesting...I remember that the ATI card I tested (Mach8) did not work on my A2286....I simply got no picture/bootup...but I will change the ET4000 to a 8514 accerlator card like an ati-mach...I am also planing to take out the network-card and go for an AST advantage RAM expansion which adds also native serial and parallel (LPT2!) to the amiga...that would be a real benefit. And of course I will takeout the SCSI harddrive to go for another solution.

https://youtu.be/P2z_6hgYvcs

@orcish75
Can you tell me how you shared the network access from the PC-Side to the Amiga?

On my machine (KS 1.3) I mount the network-share on the PC-Side with Dos TCP-IP "net use..." and if I want to get files over to the amiga side I use "awrite". That is very slow using the dualported ram of the A2286 and there is still the issue of having 8.3 Filenames to transfer. It would be better not to rename the files first before copying over. Because this is not very handy I mainly use a scsi-zipdrive to transfer files to the amiga. Is there a better way to do it?

I am still thinking about the et4000 card I am using. Though it's nice...but I want to change to an ATI solution. There is still one issue with all ET4000 cards when using the lowres 320x200 256color resolution. Compared to textmode-vga the image is shifted to the right. All ET4000 cards have that. Though there are only some games that can be used in 256colors on such a lowend machine like 286/8Mhz but I would still prefer a centered and sharp image with no jailbars. Mostly all old ISA gfx cads tend to have jailbars in plain colored areas. You have to use a premium manufacture like diamond to get a far better image quality. ATI cards tend to have a quality output too. So I am searching for an ATI card that works with A2286. Let me know if you knew one.

Beside that I also tested an AST Advantage RAM expansion with I/O. The RAM expansion worked nicely but thee was no option to get the LPT2 working. I tested every possible cofiguration. There are dependencies to the gfx-emulation "cga/mono" on the bridgeboard...I could not get it to work properly. If it had worked I would have got the ethernet card out of my setup and used a LPT-zipdrive and I also had the option to use an lpt-dac in order to get the EGA Demo working without stuttering while the PC-SPK costs to much cycles for the music and therefore the scrolling stutters.

To get an additional COM/LPT working with A2286:
- For "LPT2" it's "$3BC to $3BF".
- For "COM1" it's "$3F8 to $3FF".

Hi Dr Zeissler,

I'll have to fire up the old girl again and check. I haven't played with my Amigas in some time, been playing with my Sound Canvases and JV-1080 at the moment. I tend to go in circles with my retro stuff, ST/Amigas for a while, then Retro PCs, then the MAME cabinets, then console emulators and back to Amigas etc.

I'm almost 90% sure I used Amiga Explorer over TCP/IP. It was really slow, as you say, using the dual ported ram to transfer from the A2000 to the A2286 and then through the ISA network card, but it's still faster than a serial or parallel cable. I seem to remember that it supports greater than 8.3 filenames and you use normal Windows Explorer to transfer files. I used to get around the 8.3 filename issues before by zipping the files/folders, transfer the zip file to the Amiga, then unzip it on the Amiga side. The filenames and .info remained intact doing it that way.

I did a similar thing to your Zip drive solution, I eventually got a Tandem non-bootable IDE card for the A2000. I've got a CF-card adapter connected to it. These days I just copy everything onto a FAT formatted CF card from the PC, plug it into the CF card reader on the Amiga and copy the stuff over that way. Bit of a schlep, but much faster than over TCP/IP, especially if there's a lot to transfer.

I'm using an ATi Mach32 ISA VGA card on the A2286. Apparently it's not the fastest for DOS, it was designed mainly for Windows, but I've had no issues with it so far. I think the 286 is definitely the bottleneck in this scenario. It does have excellent image quality though, no jailbars on an LCD monitor and it has crisp text on a CRT. It also has a bus mouse interface on it, I haven't used it. One day I'll see if there's a bus mouse to PS/2 converter and use a PS/2 mouse on it. The other ISA VGA card I have is an OAK 512KB card. It's really horrible, bad jailbars on an LCD, blurry text on a CRT and the colours are washed out. I had a PCI ET4000 on my first PC back in 1996, it was an AMD 5x86-133 and seem to remember the ET4000 being a really decent card.

Pity the A2000 doesn't have more ISA slots otherwise it'd be a lot easier to use the A2286.

Thank you, I am using amiga-explorer for small files too... this is a transfer directly to the amiga via win95-pc. so no A2286 required. I will ckeck everything ET4000 related and perhaps stay on that card.

flash951 wrote on 2019-03-26, 13:55:

CPU is not emulated, the card got a real 80286. Today, people use emulation about emulating cpu in software, back then these kind of card was always refered to as emulator cards.

That's because it's both emulation.

The Amiga bridgeboards and PC daughter boards were "hardware emulators".
They had been advertised as such in 1980s ads, even.

The processors, memory and other components were available in dedicated hardware,
but they didn't do much without the emulator software that did provide i/o (video, keyboard, mouse, serial ports, HDD simulation etc).

They weren't self-sustained, so to say. They had need for an Amiga as a host.

Likewise, modern VM software does have an emulation component, too.
While the host processor is being passed through in virtualization, the PC chipset in the VM is being emulated:
The VGA card, the SB16, parallel and COM ports, DMA controllers, floppy controller, System Timer, PIT, etc pp.

The term "software emulator" isn't new, either, I think.
It exists since 1987, at least, when PC-Ditto appeared on Atari ST.

Maybe even before, if we consider the Amiga's Transformers emulator.
It ran a text-mode PC emulation at 300 KHz.

Edit:

flash951 wrote on 2019-03-26, 12:16:

For those interested in how this perform and works, I've made a video with sub-titles comments. I know many people believes the Commodore PC bridgecards are much slower than real PC's with same CPU. I think the reason for this is that most people emulates PC CGA graphics on their Amiga's instead of using a dedicated PC graphic card, this is slower than real hard ware, specially if you got a slow Amiga like a stock Amiga 2000 with 68000 @ 7,14 MHz.

I'm afraid the Janus software isn't exactly great, which might be another factor here..

Considering the limitations of the previous Transformer emulator (MDA only) and
that the bridgeboards were made in Germany/Braunschweig, the working support of CGA is a miracle, almost.

Because, I'm afraid the German engineers weren't very foreseeing, but working dutiful.

If they have had commonsense, the Janus software would have had provided support for real business graphics: Hercules Monochrome (MGA), the de-facto industry standard.

Or they would have had implemented Olivetti/Toshiba graphics mode (very easy).
It was being supported by Windows 1 to 3.1, too and was within the capabilities of Amiga/Atari ST (640x400).

Moreover, the video RAM might be there, physically.
According to CheckIt! v3, the A2286 has 2x 16KB of RAM in the CGA frame buffer location.

If that's really available, then Olivetti support might be available by upgrading/patching Janus software.
It would make GUIs like GEM, PC GEOS or Windows more usable. 🤗

That being said, other emulator boards by third-party manufacturers supported all of this,
in addition to Tandy 1000 graphics or monochrome EGA and VGA (MCGA Hi-res).

That being said, there's still something to try.

You can load SPEEDY3, an 80s era utility that speds up display output.
Just type SPEEDY3 /H to enable it.

Users of PC-Ditto (on Atari ST) had used it, too.
They had suffered from slow video, as well.

More information: Newer releases of Speedy3 available ?

flash951 wrote on 2019-03-26, 12:16:

Another reason might be that emulating a PC hard drive using an image file on an Amiga partition gives a very slow seek time for some reason, while read speed is OK. This works OK for most games, but for example Windows 3.11 that are very disk intensive, this turns it useless slow. Now, that I use a dedicated PC IDE controller, Windows 3.11 runs exactly like on a real PC with 8 MHz 286, see for yourself. (Yes, I know all this is completely meaningless in 2019).

You can try running SmartDrive with the double buffer setting.
Maybe that helps to increase performance.

If you're on plain DOS, FASTOPEN C: can help tremendously, too.

It increases performance of DIR command and file opening.

It's a miniature HDD cache, on FAT basis.
Ie, it won't cache sectors but keeps directory structure in RAM.

It also filters certain things, that's why DIR gets somewhat boosted.

PS: Thanks for the video! 😃

Edit: Ah, I see. These quotes are from a few years ago..
Then sorry for the little necro here. 😅

Jo22 wrote:

Edit: Ah, I see. These quotes are from a few years ago..
Then sorry for the little necro here. 😅

😀 Fortunately on Vogons necro postings are welcome. This info will be useful for years to come.

dr.zeissler wrote on 2024-02-25, 21:58:

Thank you, I am using amiga-explorer for small files too... this is a transfer directly to the amiga via win95-pc. so no A2286 required. I will ckeck everything ET4000 related and perhaps stay on that card.

It's a pleasure! Yup, Amiga Explorer is the best program I've come across so far to do direct transfers. I used to use a serial cable before I got the A2286 and set it up with the network card. The ET4000 is one of the best DOS gaming cards, although you're not gonna be able to run anything too taxing on the A2286, especially in 256 colour mode.

orcish75 wrote on 2024-02-27, 07:48:

Jo22 wrote:

Edit: Ah, I see. These quotes are from a few years ago..
Then sorry for the little necro here. 😅

😀 Fortunately on Vogons necro postings are welcome. This info will be useful for years to come.

Thanks, I'm glad to hear that! ^^

It also seems that a fellow Vogons user already was successful at implementing an early 640x400 mode on a an A2286.

Windows 2.x/3.x/GEM driver for a never-has-been 640x400 CGA mode

Maybe that's also why this idea came to my mind, I guess.
I didn't remember this thread at the time, but it was somewhere stuck in my subconsciousness, maybe.