Hardware Add-ons designed for x86 Cards

This page contains information on the following:

Atomwide Serial Card

The serial port card from Atomwide, in addition to its other advantages over the existing Risc PC serial interface, allows you to add extra COM ports to the PC environment, giving COM2/3/4. It's possible that some peripherals (for example Casio digital cameras) may work better on the extra ports. You will need to be using version 1.91 or later of !PC, !PCx86, or !PC Pro.

Old Serial Port Single and Dual Serial Port cards also support this functionality. Further information can be found on Hugo Fiennes' web pages at http://www.cryton.demon.co.uk/acornbits/dualserial.html.

ARM Switcher Board

This device is developed by ACE, manufacturers of the Connect-32 SCSI card, and marketed in the UK by Q-Tec, who can be contacted on 01429 890800 or as [email protected]. It fits into the processor slot normally occupied by the PC card, and provides three processor slots, plus leaving free the slot normally occupied by the ARM processor.

This makes four processor slots in total, the idea being that they are used as follows:

Front processor slot (previously used for ARM processor)
ARM Switcher Board (plugged into rear processor slot)
The unfilled "slot three" will apparently support PCI devices. Rumours indicate that these might include a PowerPC processor for running Macintosh software (which would be a remarkable and welcome achievement if it could be made to work!), a floating point accelerator, or a Matrox graphics card in order to provide greatly superior graphics speed for the PC card.

The original aim behind the ARM Switcher board was to allow StrongARM users to switch easily back to using their old ARM610 or ARM710 processor for software which was incompatible with the StrongARM. At present, you select which processor to use via a hardware switch before starting up the computer.

However, future plans for the board include software switching, which seems to involve having two "icon bars"; software loaded from one of them is run on the ARM610 or ARM710, and that loaded from the other is run on the StrongARM.

Current pricing is 119ukp inc VAT.

ISA Adapter

This device, created by Atomwide, allows standard PC ISA cards to be connected to the Risc PC. A number of configurations have been mentioned, but the most frequently-mentioned (and the one we've seen) uses an additional Risc PC slice in which to house the adaptor and the ISA cards. (This would not be a cheap upgrade...)

One of the most frequently-advocated uses of this device would be to connect an ISA graphics card for use with the PC card, thereby greatly improving graphics performance (although DOS graphics speeds have become vastly better with the advent of StrongARM in any case, and the rumoured Matrox graphics card option for the ARM Switcher (above) using PCI would provide a much greater improvement).

The adaptor does not appear to be generally available as yet; it has been in existence for a number of years, and has apparently been sold to ten customers, but there is no firm evidence of continuing development.

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