This is a PC, no really.

In the late 80s early 90s, one 3rt party vendor stood out about the others. GVP.
One solution they provided let you Amiga 500 become an IBM compatible PC.

#doscember
#doscember2022

0:00 - Intro
0:33 - A word from our sponsor
1:03 - GVP Impact II
2:54 - GVP A530
5:02 - 286
6:31 - Emulated devices
8:30 - Graphics
13:15 - PC In action
16:13 - Memory in a PC
20:30 - But why, and other questions ?
20:07 - Thanks

[nicholas_scott]

Great video I bought the ATOnce 286 emulator for my a500 back in 1990. It replaced the 68000 chip with a daughter board that had both chips plus an emulator for video/disk/etc. it used amiga memory, hard drive, and floppies. Worked great and got me through college without having to buy a pc

[unkreativnet]

I came on your channel a few days ago and as a nerd from the 80s I am so in love with your content <3

[NoPegs]

You *SHOULD* do a video on SCSI. One of the few topics not really covered well by YT creators in your style/format. Keep up the good work and happy nearly 50k!

[RobSchofield]

I thoroughly enjoyed that, great! I could hear the gears grinding in the back of my head as the brain was forced to dredge up long-forgotten detail of PC memory management in the 90s. Ahhh, those were the days 😄 Great stuff, keep it up!

[PCBWay]

Love so much your cadence!👍 Wish you a prosperous happy new year!🥳🥳🥳

[DannyAustin]

What a brilliant video. I used to lust after GVP expansion products in magazines when I was 8 years old. So cool to find out all the details of the hardware decades later

[stupossibleify]

Always look forward to your videos, and not just because I can dance along to the background music like I was in a Speakeasy. Informative video on the quirks of hardware emulation and the software hand-offs. I had a KCL PowerPC card that provides an NEC V30 via the trapdoor and spent far to long trying to understand how it accomplished the astonished task of passing I/O and video back to the Amiga. Ran Flight Sim on it in EGA!

[KarlAdamsAudio]

I could quibble about real mode segment arithmetic being somewhat different from simple bank selection (since a segment can start on any 16-byte boundary), that 286 protected mode didn't give you a flat addressing model (we had to wait for the 386 for that) & that EGA graphics (at least the 16 color mode) definitely used bit planes - but hey, it was a great video that I thoroughly enjoyed, and (small issues notwithstanding) it did a great job of explaining some pretty arcane stuff to a wider audience. Good on you for not glossing over the hardware failure too.

[RetrogradeScene]

I love how much info you pack in! Great video!

[markusjuenemann]

I had that internal Vortex ATonce board. And it worked pretty well. I use to play a lot of really PC games on it. Nice memories! Thank your for that video!

[sluxi]

Very interesting video, even with PC memory management details... but it's unfortunate that we couldn't get the live demo of the hardware.

[fur]

I used not one, but two SupraDrive 500XP with 2MB memory connected after each other (52MB and 40MB hard drives). The SupraDrive has a passthrough expansion port.

[bitwize]

"Expanded memory" used bank switching to make >1 MiB memory available via pages in the high memory area. EMM386 managed *extended* memory, putting the CPU into virtual 8086 mode and mapping blocks of extended memory in a way that looked like expanded memory.

Protected mode on the 286 was still segmented, which made memory accesses in that mode slow. Flat memory would only emerge with the 386 protected mode. DPMI extenders like DOS/4GW would only work on the 386 or higher.

[IkarusKommt]

All EGA/VGA 16-color modes are planar, not two-nibble-per-byte.
EMM386 is not a EMM manager, it is an emulator that uses 386's page translation mechanism to recreate the EMM frame.

[bryndal]

Absolutely love this trip down memory lane. I had a mate who had an Amiga 2000 with a PC Bridge Board. He had an early 386 and a 1mb Cirrus Logic graphics card for it and stuck it in his A2000 and wow! PC games on the Amiga. Not that they were all that good though given as you mentioned, the Amiga was a much better games machine at the time.

[Jopek]

The a590 was shipped with a slow XT-IDE mechanism. The controller itself can do 1.5MB/s just like the GVP if you fit a fast scsi drive. Yes I'm fun at parties

[achimhaun]

Ok this was not what I was expecting xDDD
Great video as always!!!

[mmwabanamateurradiowomble]

I remember using the CORTEX ram expansion board on the side slot and the AT-Once board in an A500 for a while, before I put together the good old A2000 with 680030/68882 Bridgeboard and MAC Emplant card and it took over all the non Amiga stuff (MAC for DTP & PC for the 'Business stuff'). A second 'big box' Amiga was crammed with '030/68882 + Genlock + Newtek Video Toaster + SCSI2 card + RAM and a pair of fat A4000s + the Raptor Engine with 24bit framebuffer cards, TBC, Newtek Video Toaster, etc were hooked up to a pair of BETAcam SPs, Two Sony edit recorders (with single frame step recording) Panasonic edit deck & Panasonic M8000 camera with PAG belt and 8track audio recorder handling the video production side of things. I also had a pair of A2000s with SCSI2 cards + a dozen hard drives + 4 CDrom drives running a multi-line BBS with USR modems for each line. Ahhh, the good old days when the combined cost of the electricity, phone bill and 6 rented TVs were between £750 and £1000 a month depending on how long (and where) we transferred files to/from over the phonelines. and we still found time to have fun with the CDTV, C64, C16, +4, C128, C128D and an Atari 1040STFM. I seem to remember there were a helluva lot of cables and never enough mains sockets.. :-)

[Retrocomputernerd]

This was a really cool video. It continues to amaze me how much hardware was created for the Amiga and how many unique solutions there were to solve the same problems.

I feel like I know a lot about Amiga, but didn’t realize there was an accelerator version of this GVP sidecar drive, much less a. PC Card for it.

It’s much more elegant than the A1000 sidecar Commodore made, but less comprehensive in what it can do (aside from processor speeds obviously)

[daspec]

Not only it had a PC on a stick, but a HARRIS 286! The fastest of the bunch :D I have the 25Mhz version of this little beast ;-)