Amiga Hardware DatabaseManufacturer Commodore, USA | Date 1990 | Amiga A2000, A3000, A4000 | Interface Zorro II | Autoconfig ID 514 / 8,9 |
- Arcnet interface
- developed from the Ameristar Arcnet Controller
- Arcnet networking system - old, slow but cheap and reliable, useful for small LANs and simple network sharing
- Arcnet requires RG62 coaxial cable instead of the RG58 used on Ethernet systems
- uses 93 ohm terminators opposed to the 50 ohm used by Ethernet
- the Arcnet interface hybrid chip comes in two different versions, HCY 9058 for bus networks and HCY 9068 for star networks
- the manual says the card uses a bus network layout with up to 256 nodes but many A2060s has 9068 hybrids for a star network layout allowing only four cards to be connected together
- to solve this the HCY 9068 can be simply replaced with a HCY 9058 chip
- interrupt driven (polled I/O) - one interrupt on the Amiga yields into a busy system
- to reduce traffic the driver uses the Arcnet hardware's four buffer as a single FIFO buffer
- the badly written driver (a2060.device) has some bugs in the FIFO buffer which results in lost packets and packet collisions - increased traffic on the Arcnet bus
- manual says 2.5 Mbit/s (300 kB/s) transfer speed but only max 100 kB/s is achievable
- socket for optional network autoboot ROM
- bus activity LED connector
- supported by NetBSD and OpenBSD
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