The Amigas standard serial port is really showing its age these days. Only capable of 115K/p and with just a single byte buffer (the UART), it's rarely capable of anything above 56K. Remember though, that Bits per second not Bytes.
There are quite few replacements for the ageing port, from Zorro cards, PCMCIA cards and the A1200 clock port.
The IOBlix1200 takes the latter route but unlike the Hypercom cards, this one seems happy to run on most A1200 revisions. This should be something to consider if you tried a Hypercom card that failed to work.
The card uses a StarTech 16C650 V2 with 32 Bytes FIFO buffer. This chip is capable of 460K/s and with the 32 bytes buffer, it does this with a lot less CPU time than the standard port at 115K.
Dodgy SoftwareOne problem to note though - The driver software is a bit dodgy. In fact, this card didn't work properly for the first 1-2 months of owning it. Chris Wiles from Active assured me on numerous occasions that there was an iminant update due next week. After a while, he suggested that I contact the author, which I did, and within weeks, the problems where sorted. Can you beleive that the author "forgot" to put in the A1200 detect code?
At the time or writing, the latest software is V39.9 and can be found on Aminet. Just search for IOBlix.
A lot of Zorro IOBlix owners have reported trouble with the latest drivers, but I haven't had a problem since I put the Buffer upto 64K. If you have trouble, email the author. I found him to be extremely helpful.
Does it need a Tower?Well... yes and no. Let me explain...
The card comes with a 25pin D type socket conected to a back plane suitable for a Tower. I was a tad anoyed about this, due to me not having a Tower at the time. But now that i have, I think it's great! The card will work with a standard A1200 case, it's just that you'll have a ribbon cable and socket hanging ouyt the back of your A1200, but you can always take the back plane off though.
As with all clock port addons, make sure that you don't have anything that gets in the way of it. Things like a BlizzardVisionPPC card, a PowerFlyer or an AteoBus can get in the way. There are ways around these problems but I haven't tried them yet.
I hope that I haven't put you off the IOBlix. Don't get me wrong, it's a great card, but It seems to have had more than it's fair share of trouble in the past, but they seem to be sorted now.
One last thing though - Don't think that this'll make the Internet go faster. Even with the standard port, I rarely need this card, so you may be able to save yourself some money.
When using my standard serial port with Genesis, MY Miggy could only manage 32K but can easily manage 115K now, but whats the point??? The internet doesn't go that fast!
92% £39 from Active Tech. FRANK MATHIESON