Rob Healey wrote:

> 	Anybody tinkered with the Zorro II/III USB Highway board or the
> 	Zorro <-> PCI mediator boards under NetBSD?
> 
> 	Any info available on the cards before I buy one or both and start
> 	tinkering?

I exchanged some emails with Michael Boehmer (one/_the_ developer of the
USB board) about drivers for NetBSD (or other Amiga *NIX systems)
and try to summarize here.

-------------
Although they have no 'official' timing data on it, the board works 
in the A3000 of one of their programmers. You can connect USB 2.0 devices
but you will only get USB 1.1 speeds (low speed or full speed, depending
on the device).

As of 2002-03 they had no demand for *NIX drivers and had not considered
the matter.
He was not opposed to such drivers but due to some bad experiences in
the Amiga market they needed to think about NDAs for external
programmers although that had never been his intention.
Another complication could be the chip vendor (don't know who this is)
for the non-PCI USB chip they use on the boards who has some influence on
this.
-------------

My conclusion:
A driver with included source code will probably not be possible for them,
but having someone with an NDA providing binary drivers for NetBSD could
be feasible.


Regarding the mediator board, I remember some questions about it on the
list this year. Should be in the archive.

I had also a short email conversation with Elbox concerning the FastATA
4000 IDE card but when I asked them what they meant by "scope of
information that will be disclosed on the FastATA's hardware" they went
silent. I have not heard from them since March.

This board has some 'special' properties which _could_ make it difficult
to support with a NetBSD driver, but I'm no expert on that.
Is anyone here interested in NetBSD support for the FastATA IDE card?

ciao
     Klaus