User avatar
Overmann

Posted Mon Feb 03, 2020 9:56 am

Hello,

Back in the day I used to own a pretty amazing A1200 tower setup. Blizzard 1260/SCSI-kit, Elbox ZIV busboard with PCI, a Picasso IV RTG card with flickerfixer and concierto IV sound card, USB, ethernet and a PCI Voodoo 3 3300. It was a beast!
However when moving from Trondheim to Oslo to study I had to sell most of it in order to pay rent. In recent years I have slowly been rebuilding the setup with a couple of modifications. The ZIV busboard PCI addon is nowhere to be found these days, and Picasso IV is way to expensive. But I kept the ZIV busboard and the tower (as well as the A1200 motherboard).

This busboard is pretty special in that it has something wlbox called FAST Zorro II mode. This is basically a mode that allows Zorro II cards to run at twice the speed (if they support it). It also has two additional slots called Zorro IV. These are basically nubus slots. Only a few cards has ever supported FAST ZII (iComp's Buddha 20th IDE controller, and DCE's version of Cybervision 64/3D). And as far as I know only ONE card ever supported Zorro IV (FastATA ZIV). I've bought the fastATA and the Cybervision. Ready to fly with the Zorro IV busboard! :D

Now, FastATA ZIV worked as expected (as fast at fastATA 4000). Great IDE speeds, no problems!
However the Cybervision is causing me problems. It simply performs exactly the same regardless of ZII or fast ZII mode. I have verified that fast ZII is actually working on the busboard by connecting the Buddha controller that usually lives in my A3000. It went from 2.2 mb/s to 3.5 mb/s. A pretty nice bump!

So here comes the question:
Has anyone here run a setup like this, or does anyone know of someone who has? I've tried the usual forums for support but allthough fastZII support on DCE's CV3D seem to be an accepted fast on the HW-databases very few people seem to know about it. Some users reported running similar setups to mine but never attempting fast ZII (as they didn't know it was supported) but noone reported having actually tried running this setup. I've contacted iComp (makers of P96 and the Buddha just to see if it was perhaps software-related) but Jens said it was a hardware thing, and that he didn't know that/if CV3D supported fast ZII. I've contacted DCE but they haven't gotten back to me. It's probably not even the same company anymore. And I've contacted elbox, the got back to me saying the never tested CV3D in fast-ZII and don't know if it supports it.

So here I am. I know there are a lot of hardware enthusiasts here so I'm hoping someone here can shed some light on this for me. Now excuse the long post but I wanted to make it a little informative for the users who might not be familiar with these HW-items. :)

User avatar
Overmann

Posted Mon Feb 10, 2020 9:34 am

It appears that CV64/3D might not support fast-ZII at all

I guess the hardware databases should be notified about this.





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