»

[jus]

I've had this Draco for about a year now, I bought it second hand quite cheaply, and being an amiga nut it was a great thing to go with my study (film studies). About half a year ago my CSPPC slowly died (first the PPC, then the 68k), so I started moving hardware from the a4000 to the draco, and was really amazed at how smoothly everything worked. Even the boot partition on my a4000 hard drive hardly needed any changes. The only thing I miss in this machine is AGA (really!) and a better gfx card, as the altais isn't really up to modern standards.
But actually, this hasn't got anything to do with my question. Recently, when browsing through my SysInspector expansion board list I saw this:

Board: DEC Alpha Prototype
Maker: Macrosystems (Germany)
Type: Zorro-III
Address: $28000000
Size: 128M

Does this mean my draco really has this prototype? I haven't really taken all the cards out of the machine yet, as they all seem very packed together, but I couldn't see such a board anywhere. Perhaps sysinspector is confusing it with the iLink DV-card? Besides, the person I bought it from didn't tell me it was there (and he did explain everything very carefully, just like any "amiga lover" would do when selling his machine :-)). If it was there, could it be put to use? Guess not, as Movieshop doesn't seem to use it. At least not the version 4.6 that I have. Maybe 5.0 does but that's impossible to get hold of as it isn't on sale anymore and is tied to the unique serial number of the draco, so buying second hand isn't possible either...
So is this a useless copro just like my CSPPC was for quite some time?


Justin

[fnord]

I never even got close to a Draco, but I remembered hearing of an alpha accelerator for the draco and this says that it really exists, so maybe you're lucky enough to have one :-D but it doesn't say anything about software support for it ....

[Edit]
amiga-hardware.com says that it isn't known wether it has been produced or not ...

[selco]

Hello Justin,
AFAIK Macroosystem planed to do a DEC-Alpha board for the Draco but canceled that project. I would *guess* sysinspector mixes something up here.

Movieshop 5 is really great and much more comfortable then 4.x. I am not sure if you can still buy it, at least it is very expensive....

You could send your questions directly to the (German) draco forum. (English is accepted as well of course)

http://home.t-online.de/home/ing.sed/
http://de.groups.yahoo.com/group/draconer/

There you would also get an answer if/where it is possible to buy Movieshop, Effectdisks and so on. Or a special OS3.9 CD if you want. (Very nice IMHO)

regards selco

[jus]

I've seen that too. But www.amiga-hardware.com says: "An optional 233Mhz DEC Alpha co-processor was certainly planned for the Draco, but it is unknown if it was ever made."
There is very little info about the draco available in general I think, considering what an effort it must have been to make them, not to speak of getting OS3.1 to run on them. Maybe Hyperion could take a look to learn for OS4? Then again they might have already done so...


Justin

[jus]

I'd guess so too that it's SysInspector getting confused at the DV module. Then again it would be nice just to have it, even if it wouldn't do anything. I would then have:
1. The fastest amiga expansion available.
2. The most useless amiga expansion available.
I know some places are still selling MovieShop 5.0 but it's hugely expensive, and I'm really really short on cash. The first money I get I will spend on fixing the CSPPC to run OS4 on I think...
Thanks for the info about the forums and OS3.9. I already have a 3.9 cd for the a4000, and it worked on the Draco, though everybody says it isn't possible. Maybe it's because I actually use a ScalOS Workbench?


Justin