🚀 go-pugleaf

[Line-eaters, myth or fact? News at 11:00]

In article <17668@swrinde.nde.swri.edu>, kent@swrinde.nde.swri.edu (Kent D. Polk)
makes my heart jump with joy due to the 2nd "Real Life" Amiga
application announcement in two weeks:

[lotsa stuff deleted]

>Although I have an A2500 on order, I am looking fo info to determine
>its reliability, usefulness, etc. for light industrial operation and am
>concerned about it's appropriateness.
> 
>Q: Is the A2000 is robust enough (maybe a rackmount version) for such
>use?

Having banged around my system alot, sometimes during HD access, I
would certainly clear the Amiga for "light industrial operation".
Make sure you use high quality HD's and don't forget to tighten those
screws. I forgot that once... :-}

>Q: Has anyone experienced bus read problems (similar to the bus read
>garbage on PC's) on the Amiga? Can one recover from a bus error?

No, but I (or SW/HW in my system) probably never pushed into the
regions you're headed. 
(Going baldly, erh boldly where noone has gone before :-)

>We use GPIB devices quite often, usually configured with only 1 or 2
>listeners, so setup is quite easy. However we need FAST transfer speeds
>and FAST bus setup times. When DMA is not used, most transfers are
>small, but bus setup time & small block transfer rate needs to be
>optimized and these type of operations bring the National Instruments
>PC GPIB board to its knees.  This is where I have to write my own
>custom drivers.
> 
>Q: Does anyone have such info relating to the ASDG GPIB board & it's
>operation on the Amiga with respect to the type of operations I just
>described?

To my greatest surprise I do have such info. The ASDG TwinX/GPIB board
will NOT support DMA. However you can have the DMA request trigger an
interrupt.

>Q: ASDG TwinX boards: Since I haven't tried to access custom hardware
>the system, does ASDG provide software to access TwinX modules?  Can
>one purchase driver source code?

Dunno, you might wanna ask Aaron Avery (aaron@madnix.UUCP) or even
Perry K. himself. ASDG sells you a driver (GPIB.library) with the
stuff, though.

>Q: Does ASDG buffer any of their modules/provide memory mapping for
>fast access? (This is one place that a multitasking driver could be a
>godsend). I usually have to wait for an event & then grab stuff from
>lots of different inputs (position/velocity/instrumentation values)
>over GPIB, digital I/O & A/D inputs. On our black boxes we always try
>to use memory mapped architecture so this can be done quickly. (Try to
>do this fast on an Intel chip - Ha!)

Dunno (see above), but from my documentation this doesn't seem to be
the case. They do support 8 or 16 bit modules, though. 

>Q: What modes of access to the PC bus are available from the Amiga
>side? Do I have to involve the 80xx.x in the process, or can I read the
>AT bus directly?

Nope, the AT bus only shares the power with the rest of the Amiga. You
must either use a CBM Bridgeboard or wait for that dumb but fast and
cheap connection bridge that was proposed here some months ago.
But with your knowledge and resources a "dumb" bridge should be nooo
problem. (Thus spoke the softhead and quickly fleed. :-)

>=======================================================
>       Kent Polk - Southwest Research Institute
> {cs.utexas.edu, gatech!petro sun!texsun}!swrinde!kent
>              kent@swrinde.nde.swri.edu 
>-------------------------------------------------------
>       "Anything worth doing is worth overdoing"
>=======================================================
Ya betcha! :-)

BTW, I already answered some of Kent's questions in a related posting
to c.s.a last week. But that was eaten by our @#!?%& mailer!

Hope that helps,

- <CB>
--  _  _
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