Retro Tech Nibble: My Amiga 500 is an IBM PC 

Thanks for sharing it with us 😀

yeah that was really interesting.. was very odd seeing it doing a mem check on boot.. does it run the amiga in the background then? could you pull that msdos screen down to reveal the amiga working behind it? or was it literally a PC..not emulation

@@bazza5699 No multi tasking. It boots the bios of the board and takes over the video and i/o hardware. Its very odd when the KCS BIOS takes over the floppy (back when my floppy drive was working). It _sounds_ like a PC. Funny how you get used to a particular hardwares noises...

Leon Verrall : yes. Thank you, it was good to see in use. I wanted one back in the day. I always pictured it as being a pc that would multi task with the Amiga being a separate card eg drag the screen down to see and use workbench. I guess I’d have been a bit disappointed.

You are a gentleman and a scholar. Thanks for allowing us to see this.

Meow 😥😮

:V

Hahaha, no MS-DOS is human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!

@Jip Jackson windows me is where my godly patience is comming from

@Jip Jackson ah yes, the bluescreen the most screamed at screen there is

> (What's ironic is that EGA itself is a planar format, so it could have been very fast had the implementation been better.) That's an interesting point. You should be able to pass memory writes straight through to Amiga memory and then switch banks on a port access. Mind you EGA had some funky write modes where you'd write to all the banks simultaneously which you'd need to emulate. You'd actually be better off with a card that used the some of the onboard RAM to emulate a VGA card, but then you'd need to plug your monitor into the card outputs which I don't think was possible from a card in the A500.

I think this is why on the competitor to this board that I had (ATOnce Plus) they didn't even try to implement the 16-colour mode for EGA. It only supported colour in CGA mode and left the EGA and VGA emulation as 2-colour monochrome only (along with support for Hercules, T3100, and Olivetti hi-res monochrome support). Much more sensible for the "real work" focus and no disappointing super-slow EGA colour mode.

I'm impressed it could do EGA at all to be honest given the hardware.

Mode 13h on VGA was linear, but plenty of VGA modes were planar as well. VGA had the official "modes" included in the BIOS, but they were just settings for the onboard chips. Software could create wildly varing modes by taking charge of the settings itself, though your monitor wasn't guaranteed to actually show them. There were quite a few hacked modes for VGA, Mode X being a popular one, I think Doom used that.

Although, WordPerfect did have an Amiga version of their word processor on the market, back then. I even think Lotus 1-2-3 was available for the Amiga. Now, running Microsoft Word 5.5 for DOS on an Amiga would have been pretty cool or even Geoworks Ensemble 😎 I wonder how Autocad 2.6 would perform on this pc card?

Ah yes! There is a RiscPC episode on the channel in which we install a 586 card. Very cool machines

I once had a Gravis Ultrasound. It had the same delicious red colour, maybe this card is from around the same era? Nowadays you get almost any colour card you can think of.

John Knight : you could run MacOS emulator on the Amiga. It runs faster than a real Mac so yes this was/is indeed possible. There is a RU-vid video demonstrating. I don’t have the link to hand I’m afraid.

Found it. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Jph0gxzL3UI.html A really handsome and knowledgable presenter as well. ;-)

Yes, absolutely you could. The ideal solution would be a fast 386 or 486 bridgeboard for the PC side of things in one slot and an Emplant Card to cover the Mac side of things. Stuff both of those into an A2000 with an accelerator and hard drive (or better) and you'd have the ultimate do-everything machine. amiga.resource.cx/exp/emplant

You're welcome, thanks for taking the time to watch

Mine worked great, but one odd issue was that when it did crash, all the error messages were in german! I used my ATOnce right up until 1998. It wasnt until all my friends got obsessed with "Half-life" that I was coerced into getting a "real PC". lol

I had one for my Amiga 500, but it crashed all the time. It was more of a novelty, didn't use it much.

Me too! See my response above!

I guess I was lucky, all work was done on Unix and Vax/VMS when I was in college in the early 1990s.

I used to install these daughterboards on Amiga and Atari computers. The CPU was an 80386 and the boards were much smaller because they used the computer's memory instead of their own. If I remember correctly, they were around $100.00. We ran Windows 1.0, DR DOS 5.0, Ventura Publishing, AutoCad and they all ran as well as you would expect.

@@ct92404 It's funny that I can now relate to my great aunt who was born in 1913. She used to ride in a horse and buggy when she was a little girl. She saw the invention of FM radio, color film, television, record players, and computers. She lived just short of 100 years. I remember a time before video games didn't exist. A long distance phone call across the country cost real money. Black and white televisions were still common. My first computer had 4 kilobytes on it and I was an expert working on that system by the time I was 9. Storage was done on a cassette tape drive. I remember back in the 1980s, someday televisions would be as thing as a picture frame.. This was before LCD's and the technology they were talking about were NOT LCD's - it was a modified CRT that didn't have an electron gun - the technology is dead and you never saw it hit the market. I'm an engineer in Silicon Valley, I almost think we're done in where we can go. There will be no better displays, television and radio are obsolete, a $70 computer is as powerful as my workstation was 18 years ago, and could service my ENTIRE university back in the 1990s. You have all the information you want in front of you, you can talk to anybody in the world, you have access to over a hundred years of film and television, and radio. What's left to be done?

@@ct92404 It was called a "field emission display". The idea was to create a cloud of electrons within a vacuum - this is basically how a vacuum tube works. Then to light up a dot on the screen you would create a positive charge at that location, this would cause the electrons in the cloud to hit that spot lighting the phosphor dot. They made a few prototypes but it never made it to manufacturing. It could have competed against LCD, but it looks like LED will take that out eventually.

In theory that would work, it WILL run on an 8086 with just a little bit of slowdown when loading.

In principle, this appears to be plugging a whole PC into the trapdoor slot, minus any provision for adding cards to the isa bus.

PC Task ran on a standard A500 aswell... but slow. Arcade Volleyball was slooow but still enjoyable.

Jörgen Pryss I ran “Cool Crocodile Twins” on it 😄

@@kanalnamn PC Task 3.1 can still run on 68000 CPU.

I'm guessing it's technically an emulator in that while code executes natively on the x86, the 68000 is emulating other parts of the system like the display adapter and floppy controller.

Its what was referred to back in those days as "hardware emulation", as opposed to software emulation. For older but similar examples see the various "Z-80 cards" for the Apple II or the CP/M cartridge for the Commodore 64.

Yeah I did the same downloading tapes for my ZX Spectrum.

You're welcome, thanks for watching!

Had that one on my a2000

Would make sense from a speed perspective. 2 colour mode is unequivocally the fastest of the Amiga graphics modes, and it get slower with every bitplane you add. Probably part of why the EGA performance is dismal.

At 7:57 there's a shot of the card configuration and it says "F4 Fast Mono EGA/VGA". It doesn't say if it's on or off. Since earlier in the video he says that the card doesn't support 256 colours because the, I believe, HAM technique wasn't in common usage back then, it would make sense to default to Mono to improve performance and avoid colour clash. Maybe just needed to flip a toggle option. But given how slow the EGA was, it might have been much worse.

@@complexacious HAM8 was known about, it was a documented feature, and available in Dpaint. It wasn't in common use because it was too slow to be practical for anything except displaying still pictures.

You'll find a RiscPC episode on the channel where I install a 586 card. Cool machines I like them

That would be 3 and a half inch low density floppies. I used that method to convert images and text files to PC readable formats. Happy days.

Yes. There’s a video on RU-vid showing it

I am shocked, SHOCKED, that there wasn't, as far as I can tell, a PD Amiga knockoff.

There was much more variety than you imply in the early 1990s. At work the engineers used PCs, Unix workstations like Sun, and the Vax mainframe, while the managers had Macs as Executive status symbols. At home friends and colleagues had an equal variety of computers, with low end PCs, and Amigas. I had the absolute reigning master of music sequencing at the time, an Atari ST, while one of the managers I mentioned was a huge fan of the Acorn Archimedes, only reluctantly switching to a Mac at home many years later.

The Acorn Archimedes was a great computer! My dad used to have one for a biology research lab he had been working at up until around 1995 I think. It was really underrated at the time and should have been more popular in my opinion. It barely had any games made for it, but the Archimedes found its way into professional use, mainly among scientists I believe. The Archimedes was also historically important as it was the very first ARM computer and was extremely efficient at pushing out integer calculations very quickly.