ScuzzBlog: Diaries December 2019
Entry 9th December 2019: Post 01: Amiga 2000 - A2088XT Emulator Card.
Amiga 2000 - A2088XT Emulator Card.
Yesterday I removed two cards from an Amiga 2000 to place in safe
storage. I was slightly troubled that in my efforts to get the hd
working on this machine, which just stops working at times. I may
just be putting these cards at risk.
By way of recording the cards I created this blog featuring the
current images.
The first card is the Commodore A2088XT Emulator dated 1986, which
pre-dates the release of the Amiga 2000. The card is a full length
Zorro II board which emulates an 8088 PC. The card when plugged
into a Zorro and ISA slot allows for the use of real 8bit ISA cards.
In addition to supporting 360K based 5.25" floppy drives it also
supports Amiga floppy drives and can read 720K DOS disks.
What is truly amazing is that this card has not one Intel chip but
actually two Intel chips ...Intel '78 '83 and Intel '80 '84.
'78 '83 .. Core Frequency 5 MHz Board Frequency 5 MHz Data Bus 8 Bit
Address bus 20 bit Transistors 29000 Voltage 5 V Year 1979 P8088
'80 '84 .. The 8087 was the first coprocessor released for the
80x86 family of Intel processors. Introduced in 1980 and was released
to support the 8088 and 8086. This is the FPU for the card.
Core Frequency 5 MHz Board Frequency 5 MHz Transisitors 45,000 1980.
It really is amazing what you find lurking on some of these expansion
boards. Not a great fan of emulators. I have never seen the point
myself as I prefer to have the real thing.
PS: I did feature the 1 MB RAM board that was also in this computer
the other day. The only card now left in the A2000 is the GVP HC+8
Series II Rev II. Hard drive controller plus modest RAM.
There are three distinct marks on this board which at first I
thought may be damage. However, due to the colour and nature of
the marks I believe they were placed there during the checking of
the cards during production.
Amiga 2000 - A2088XT Emulator Card.
|
