I bought an non-working A500 off eBay a couple years ago, and the ATonce was inside it, which was a nice little unexpected bonus, but I pulled it out in order to get the machine working and never gave it a try. Besides, I'm not a fan of putting the thick legs of a round turned-pin socket into a single/double wipe style socket since that can ruin the wipe style socket over time. Maybe someday I'll install it to see if it still works...

Had it too. Worked fine. Even without a hard drive.

Hmm... that's just the opposite of my experience with the ATonce. I sold Amigas and none of my customers had much luck with it.

@@jimsteele9261The trick was to NOT try to have both systems going at same time. instead, when you want to run as a PC, you only give the AmigaOS the bare min amount of mem and resources to function. Later versions addressed this by also adding memory to the daugherboard. Most non-games worked fine for me.... though any crashes brought up error messages in German!

@@nicholas_scott The "Plus" version is the one I had and it was definitely a lot better. The speed bump on the 286 to 14MHz was okay, but the onboard 512KB of dedicated PC RAM was the real gold. It also really helped if you had even a little bit of FAST RAM expansion on your A500. I ran it no problems with a mostly stock Amiga 500 with a 2nd floppy drive and a 2MB RAM sidecar. When I wanted to use the PC emulation I had a script file set up that I could run that would make a 1MB RAM drive and copy all the necessary emulator files from the ATOnce disk and a minimal DOS "C: drive" install over to it and run it straight from RAM and allocate another 512KB of the fast ram to the PC so that it had a full 1MB available to it. That left the Amiga still able to run normal Amiga stuff with 512KB CHIP (minus the PCs video RAM) + 512KB slow + 512KB fast, and I could use the internal floppy for the Amiga and the external floppy for whatever PC software I was running. Multitasking both systems was pretty good with that setup even with a stock 68000.

if i'm not mistaken, every graphics mode even vga 256col (mode 13h) used bit planes. just in 256c, planar access was "hidden" from the prog. and the card used the first 2bits of the byte writen to select the plane and the rest for the color. faster access but wasted 3/4 of the vram. mode x/y revert the vga to 256c planar. full vram but slower access (mostly). meh, pros and cons...

@@giornikitop5373 Exactly!

@@EgonOlsen71 yeah, basically every graphics chip since the m6548 era used bitplanes, but the amiga custom chips used them is a very different way, making ports between amga/pc a nightmare. anyway, in the pc, once 486 was out, due to it's very fast memory access (1 clock), plannar access was not needed anymore.

have no info. the the main suject of the video, but the intarnal CPU swap out card, and replace CPU on top, PC Dos side thing on the Amiga, showed if you didnt no, looking a emulators, to the point PC Dos, would if required sit in a app windows box, I think, but it defiantly, amiga sliding up-down windows like all good well behaved Amiga app/games did, amiga still the beating in background just with PC over the top of the desktop screen, the amiga on the box not related the add on card PC 720k format floppy disc, driver on the install disc, set little than copy and paste the in right folder 740k dos reading done on an amiga, not a big deal,

Hmm, I'm not sure about VGA 16-colour. I think the sequencer in those modes does actually read 16 bits at a time and then cuts them up into 4-bit pieces for translation into actual colour values through the DAC. Doing a bit of a weird retrograde thing in 256 colour where it does that but then combines them back into two bytes (essentially the DAC has 16 notional palettes, one nibble picks the palette and the other picks the colour within it, and IIRC you can even make use of that in 16-colour mode with specific palette-swapping commands). EGA and below though, and those modes on VGA, sure.

@@tahrey the VGA and EGA 16 color modes are all the same, as in they're planar

EMM386, allows the USE of "upper memory", on a 286, first 640k, was given, then you had some work to get to 384k left as Upper Memory, so in your Dos Config file, you could tell DOS, & TSR's into that memory out of 640k you needed to run a Program .. If you wanted a Bridgeboard Card to get moving with Video, That's what the PC Slots are for on Amiga 2000 Motherboard, give the Bridgeboard, Controller Cards, Its own Video, Floppies, Hard Drives, things start getting smoother ..

@@peterhalin does that maybe mean the 256 colour modes are a strange kind of planar as well? There must be some benefit to using the ModeX tweak vs the built in 13h. Like it's actually the only way to get chunky or whatever?

That was an ST one wasn't it?

@@tahrey ATonce was available for both Amiga and ST. Later Vortex produced SCSI RAID controllers for x86 PCs.

And that was done because of the prevalence of IDE - the standard that was current then for the PC. SCSI drives were the domain of Apple, high end servers, and fancy workstations.

Yep, they were using XT-IDE in their PC line at the same time and no doubt the 20MB WD drives they bought were among the cheapest slowest drives available.

Part of preformance issue was also how it loaded the CPU for data transfers. It could indeed be faster with a bettter disk, as long as your cpu had nothing else it needed todo. A big block of data being transfered would really busy out the cpu and make workbench rather unresponsive for the duration.

@@RetroBytesUK maybe with XT it eats CPU? Can't remember for sure now whether XT was CPU bound or not. SCSI is DMA in the A590 and does not eat CPU cycles as long as you have some genuine fast ram in the system. The GVP cannot perform either without real fast. :-)

The 286 (and 186 to an extent if I’m not remembering weirdly) versions of protected mode really feel like a strange beta, like a bodge on the old system while they remove all the rough edges of the finished (386) version.

@@kaitlyn__L 286 was 16bit & 386 = 32bit, except for pathetic 386sx, which had 16bit to 32bit built in, Intel was a mess back then, they were still working out a Modern CPU's Architecture ..

@@James_T_Quirk indeed, though the bus width doesn’t inherently have anything to do with 286 protected mode’s oddities (esp given the 386SX). Though I can see your point that Intel was just trying everything somewhat indiscriminately (and their non x86 CPUs from the time were even more screwy!!)

@@kaitlyn__L 186 didn't have a protected mode. It had a 16-bit data bus and added a few instructions like ENTER, LEAVE, and BOUND that you also find on the 286, but it couldn't directly address more than that 1 MiB of RAM.

You mean mapped into "upper memory". "High memory" is actually the first 64k over 1Mb which was addressable because of the way the memory segmentation worked. The "Upper memory" is/was the IO space above 640k where devices were mapped, but could also have memory mapped into. This really only became common only with 386 hardware where a memory manager would remap RAM to allow freeing of conventional

It does score very well on sysbench, it beats my old 386sx hands down.

@DannyAustin - Did you lust after things in other types of magazines during your adolescent years?

damn ... what were you even doing with all that?

@@tahrey Sounds like a Toaster Farm & Digital Video Processing, I had one running myself, still have the 12 A2000's &2 Toasters etc that ran mine, but after not doing much with it last 20 years it's just a "Sea of Cables", If I had to set it all up again, it may be a issue, when things where happening I was just buying more bits to add to get results I needed, but the path the Amiga's grew is a bit of mystery lost to time, I may have to read the manual this time, just to hook it all up ..

Those raptor engine cards where fairly darn expensive, there where not many places with those. Where you doing qlot of 3d work with them.

That would have been a very nice machine back then, not the cheapest machine, but a very nice one.

@@RetroBytesUK It was easier to put it in another box, bridgeboards are great things, but tricky to run, but with Own Video and HARD DRIVE they speed up, with the PC slots on Amiga 2000 you could add a Controller card, so give PC side Hard Drive, Floppies, I/O & Video of it's own, then a 286 got moving ... I have both XT & AT Bridgeboards here, never got my hands on a Goldengate 486, but wanted one..

Its a really nice card when it behaves.

@@RetroBytesUK Does it play Wolf3D?

I was. A classmate has been collecting hardware like this since the 90s.... he shows some of his stuff here kzfaq.info/get/bejne/fN5glb2GndWbg2w.html ( but its in german )

@@James_T_Quirk It would, but you wouldn't want to. The GFX were SOOoooo SLOW! It might be hard to imagine now, but back then, memory was at a real premium - especially in the 80's! Lead engineer, Jay Miner pioneered the use of multiple addressable bitplane graphics as a way to mitigate the issue - and you can see this going all the way back to the old Atari computers (400/800 series). The Atari 400 initially came with 8K, although quickly upgraded to 16K - and thank God! My little 400 back in the day hardly had any memory left - BUT - you could use every graphics mode available by the chipset. You couldn't do that on a low-end TRS-80 Color Computer! Miner's trade off was a nifty workaround. It allowed more color with less resolution, or the other way around if you liked. True, characters had to be physically drawn pixel by pixel by the system (problematic for chunky high resolution text), but 80 column graphics weren't a thing back then. Besides that, the Amiga was initially designed as a game machine. So it makes sense from that perspective. You could get a LOT of bang for your memory buck Jay's way. BUT... It wasn't great for character-based graphics - something other computers excelled at. In other words: GREAT for the Video Toaster and other video applications. TERRIBLE for console text or word processing. AGA graphics on the A1200/A4000 went a long way to addressing this problem. You could call up higher resolutions with speedier text AND graphics. 3D games like 'Doom' were MUCH more playable on those platforms, but by then the ship had sailed and even a base PC with VGA graphics was essentially superior to the Amiga's graphics hardware. A developer told me that the 'AAA' chipset had been designed and it was even far more powerful than AGA. It allowed for compatibility with the old bitplane and AGA, but also added character-based chunky graphics. Ultimately, it was never fully developed because by that time, Commodore had bigger issues to deal with.

@@Chordonblue I Know But the "test" at the Time was if your 286 had 1 meg ram you could run Wolfenstein 3D, but memory was critical so you had to push Dos=High etc to make sure you got it, when I visited local computers clubs at the Time, it was running on all the PC's sometimes ... PS.. I just remembered, I have a Toshiba Laptop here 286 1 meg ram, Orange Plasma Screen Card Slots, but when I bought it (2000?), I installed Wolf3D just to test the machine out, make sure it was firing on all thrusters, so to speak ..

Do you still have that Amiga and the gvp?

@@msuc5vette Unfortunately no. I gave it away to a friend who is an Amiga collector. He actually took good care of it.

It seems like Commodore was going for "sleek and compact" with their early Amiga models, trying to avoid the "boxy" slots look of the PC and Apple II. But the side expansion is painful, and you either have the TI-99/4A sidecar experience, or you need a wraparound expander that sits above/below in a huge slab case the size of the entire original machine, and gradually lifts your monitor higher and higher...

@@DMahalko AND... God forbid should you BUMP your Amiga! Best case scenario, the machine locks up and you have to restart, re-load Workbench, etc. Worst case? Hardware damage. I worked for a dealership back in the 90's and we saw both cases... Unfortunately. BUT, USB/fast serial connections were still many years away (although pioneered by Amiga's distant cousin - the Atari 400/800!), and you still had the FCC breathing down your neck, so you had to worry about proper shielding.

Well Apple Liked the Sidecar Look, they ended up bolting a Amiga on the side of Mac, so they could use it for Video Work ..

@@Chordonblue When I worked for a Computer Chain here in Australia, in 1980-90's, A Guy bought a Digi-View from us, took it home, DID NOT READ the MANUAL, Decided that it needed to be plugged in to the Wrong Port, did he scan the rear & Find the Right Port ?, No took some Needle Nose Pliers bent the "d-Shell" away and bent pins trying to make it fit, This having FAILED, He came back to SHOP & Abuse us for scamming him, when we explained his error or "Gross Stupidity" he left after abusing us some more ... I miss the 80's ...

@@James_T_Quirk You had to be of a certain mindset in the early days. Very little detail was explained to a customer - unless they asked. It was just too much for some folks. At my dealership, here in PA, USA, we carried PCs and Amigas. We had a customer who bought a laptop (Acer). It was one of the first COLOR models back in the 90's. VERY expensive. It used one of those trackballs as a pointing device. The trouble with those back then is that they would often get 'sticky' and the little rollers that held the ball in place were hard to clean. Only a few days after purchase, he complained about it, and we contacted Acer who promptly blew him off and told him to get clean his hands better before using it. 😑 A few weeks later, the guy was back with what remained of his laptop in a box. Sheepishly, he explained that he had literally and repeatedly stomped it flat in complete frustration. 😮He wanted to know if there was anything we could do. Now this guy was a locally prominent businessman, a regular suit and tie kind of guy - you would have NEVER expected this kind of display from him. So, the owner went to bat for the guy, calling Acer directly and explained the situation. It took a while, but eventually his call got bumped up to the PRESIDENT of Acer! And, believe it or not, Acer actually shipped him a new model - sans trackball this time, of course. 🤣

It's amazing just how different the A500 looks compared to the A2000, the latter having all the styling of a concrete brick 😅

@@XalphYT German engineering isn't always pretty. 😁

It's sort of like shared video memory with an onboard graphics system, or a low end AGP card... except it's the CPU that has to wait, and when you upgrade, you're separating out the CPU somewhat rather than putting in a graphics card with its own memory. It's not really that bad a setup, Atari and Apple did exactly the same (heck, most non-PC machines were like that). It was only really useful in the Amiga if you were running the higher graphics modes that monopolised the chip memory bus and slowed the CPU quite significantly (not a problem with the ST and Mac... because they simply didn't have those modes), if you were at 320x200 in 16 colours it made very little meaningful difference as the 68000 has relatively slow memory access (vs its clock speed) that means you can interlace video and CPU access together without either stumbling over each other, but for essentially 1 to 3 wait-states on the rare instructions that aren't inherently 4-clock aligned anyway. (or if you had an accelerator running at more than the normal system clock, as any access to chip memory, even if not contended by video, would still have to run at the lower speed) Apple even copied the idea fairly wholesale for some of their cheaper Mac IIs / LCs with onboard video. Had a couple of internal memory banks, if you only had one populated then you were stuck having to share and the mode you used could have a significant effect on computing speed and usability, as image quality had gone up a good bit faster than bus transfer rates (possibly the video system even did something fancy like the Atari Falcon, with a 32 bit backdoor into memory that's otherwise accessed 16 bits at a time). But with memory in both banks, you could have video residing in one and code/data preferentially using the other (until the space ran out of course), giving a fastRAM speedup for the OS and whatever would fit in the remaining space for that bank.

@@tahrey The thing is - many topologies tried UMA - where normal RAM is used as general purpose memory as well as graphics RAM, and all of them failed in the end, because it makes general purpose RAM quite expensive, while video performance did suffer. Even modern computers have separate memory, and that is for a reason.

Re "access to it via the PCIe bus is really, really slow" Hey, you don't know slow -- the original ISA cards, which stuck around even as processors advanced and CPU MHz cranked up, were sloooooooow. Some fancy motherboards allowed the card speed to be set higher, like 11MHz, and individually for each slot, so a good quality Super VGA card could go into the 11MHz slot and other cards still run at 8MHz. And, accessing a byte is slower than accessing a 16-bit word, because the legacy ISA (8-bit slot) originally defined the protocol to use more cycles. It was improved with the 16-bit extension, but that only applies to 16-bit transfers. I think the primary effect you see today is that it's set to non-caching since the GPU might write to it.

@@graealex Xbox Series X and PS5 have unified GDDR6-14000 memory with 320-bit and 256-bit wide bus respectively. AMD 4700S SKU recycled PS5's 16GB 256-bit GDDR6-14000 and APU (disabled integrated GPU) that are sold in East Asian markets. For PC, UMA is used in low-end desktops and laptops e.g. Rzyen 7 6800U/6800H's 12 CU RDNA 2-based integrated GPU. All Ryzen Zen 4 SKUs include 2 CU RDNA 2-based integrated GPU. PC's ReBar feature enables the CPU to fully access the discrete GPU's VRAM while the PC's discrete GPU still has system memory as "shared GPU memory". UMA is not dead on the PC.

@@valenrn8657 It's very much dead on the PC. All examples proof it - it works well for consoles, but makes normal PCs slower and more expensive, especially since it has negligible benefits. This was always the problem with UMA, lack of benefits, especially perceivable benefits for the end-user. Oh, and ReBar isn't UMA. It's still a separate memory pool with different access speed.

Sun's PC card is a really fascinating bit of kit, there is an intersting devision of labour going on with it. The pc processor (486 on the one I used) is there to run application code and some windows code, while the win16 api was emulated on sparc in a sort of similar way that wine does. The big difference with wine is it only emulated a few key libraries for drawing and device access, and used licensed libraries from Microsoft for the rest of the win16 apis. This ment it could run any win16 app. I never did get to try a win9x or NT compatible version, just the windows 3.1 compatible verison. It could run some dos software, basically if it worked in the dos box for win 3.1 it would work on Sun's system. unsurprisingly it was quiet expensive, as it used a licensed verison of windows, a 486 and some of its own ram.

@@RetroBytesUK Interesting. I'm pretty sure we ran Win2k on ours, but if not it would have been Win98 SE (though most likely 2k, definitely not 3.1). I don't remember the cost, only that it was cheaper than getting our developer a second workstation just so he could run Office and Visual Source Safe (VSS). I think I actually still have that SparcStation with PC card somewhere upstairs in a box that hasn't been opened in 20 years 😼.

Commodore wanted the room for OLD CHEAP CLUNKY HARD DRIVES, so it appeared a bargain ..

At the same age it qqs probability the thing I wanted most, only had to wait another 20 years to get one.

Thanks, it took me by suprise too.

Fast, it is installed in Pimiga 3.0 ..

Even worse, when the PC first hit the market, the lowest option was 16k of RAM! The first motherboard could have 16-64k, they later upgraded it to the 64-256k one. If you wanted more memory, you had to use upgrade boards in the slots.

@@kpanic23 Yikes! And I checked the introductory price. It was US$1,565. I hereby revise my comment: "... only 1 lady in Iowa bought that non-floppy model. After showing it to her two friends, they laughed and laughed."

I probably should have sounded a little more snarky for that line. The first PCs I had access to also where floppy only, but so much software I wanted to use required a hard disk to be installed to

@@RetroBytesUK Well Yes I was running a Classroom with 4PC-XT's Twin Floppies (Teaching Wordstar etc) luckily being Government Funded, they paid for 4 x 20 MEG ST-506 HDD, at only $1495.00 each .. What I really hated was a New User who put the Floppy Disk between the 2 Floppy Drives, not in them, as I had the remove&reinstall a floppy to fix 3 times..

They must have just used the power, as the data and addressing pins where not linked to anything other than the other isa slots (including the one the bridge board could be inserted into).

@@RetroBytesUK There was something called the "Golden Gate 2+" that was sort of a bridgecard without any PC hardware on it that let you use some ISA cards (with special Amiga drivers) directly on the Amiga. Maybe that's what Digital Archaeologist is thinking of? There were drivers for PC parallel, serial, hard drive controllers, and non-DMA network cards, etc. There was also some ability to use the ISA cards from software PC emulators like CrossPC or PCTask, iirc.

You can understand how they got in that mess, but you're exactly right thank goodness for protected mode.

I used to lust over one of them.. somehow I convinced myself they wouldn’t be as good as they looked, but I’ve since seen stuff about them on KZfaq that makes me think I should have taken the plunge

287 math coprocessor.

Yep Pete is spot on

It's very similar to the experience of using a normal big-box 286 bridgecard without a dedicated ISA graphics card. Sluggish video speed just like if you use the bridgecard's Janus software to display the PC screen on the Amiga's display, just with a few extra available (even slower) video modes. Fine for productivity software, less so for even CGA games. Having an accelerated Amiga probably helps speed up that display translation though.

The clock is handled by the Amiga side of things. Since making the video, I've discovered a few screen modes cause it to crash, so I'm thinking its somthing on the amiga side, possibly somthing on the chip ram side of things, or the flicker fixer, as that gets inserted between the mother board and Denise.

Me too

I bought it from eBay, but about 12-15 years ago. I have no idea where you would fine one now at a none stupid price. I bough everything you see and a A570 for about £50. People where more or less just throwing that stuff out around then.

@@RetroBytesUK incredible. I bought an A500 in a charity shop for about a tenner around the same time, but I couldn't work out how to use it so I gave it away! Kinda wish I'd stuck with it and done more research.

Are you sure you're not getting your wires crossed? The DOS-compatible Mac models do indeed have most of a PC on a card, but you don't use Connectix Virtual PC to use it. It should come with its own software to run the PC in a window or in full screen.

I edited that, I typo St506 instead xt-ide..

I do, but it just really ammuses me to call it that.

It was so frustrating, it waited until the moment I wanted todo the screen capture to fail.

It must be camera shy.