Village Tronic Ariadne

Picture of Ariadne




Ariadne is a modern Zorro-II Ethernet card for the Amiga models A2000, A3000 and A4000. It supports both Ethernet standards 10BASE-2 (Thin Ethernet) and also 10BASE-T (Twisted Pair). You can easily switch between these two hardware protocols via software. There are 32 Kbytes of buffer RAM on board and also an option for a boot EPROM.

Additionally, Ariadne offers two extra parallel ports to connect a printer, a scanner, or any other peripheral device. Beside a normal parallel driver we also supply two network drivers for these parallel ports: One ParNet driver and a SANA-II compatible PLIP driver, called liana.device. You can therefore install two peer-to-peer connections to smaller Amiga computers without any Zorro-II slots.

The network drivers for Ethernet and the parallel ports are both SANA-II compatible. Therefore every network software package based on Sana-II can be used with the Ariadne. For example, AmiTCP or Envoy which is included with the Ariadne. Envoy offers FileSystem import and export, network printing and multi-user support together with an easy installtion and configuration procedure.

Requirements

Features

Board Layout
   _____________________________________________________________
  |                Parallel Port 2  1234   1      _____         |___
  |                 ############    OOOO   :::   |     |        |
  |     JP1 ..      1               LEDs   LED   |EPROM|        |#
  |     Boot                            Connector|     |        |# DB25
  |                                              |     |        |# Parallel
  |                                              |_____|        |# Port 1
  |                                                             |#
  |                                                             |
  |                                                            #| RJ45
  |                                                            #| 10BASE-T
  |                                                             |_
  |                                                             |_| BNC
  |_____________________________________________________________|   10BASE-2
  |||||||||||||||||||||||||||                                   |

Jumpers

  JP1: Enable Boot ROM?
      Off: Set to disable autobooting (default).
       On: Set to enable autobooting from an on-board EPROM.

Connectors

  LED Connector (6-pin header)
    Pin 1: (LED 1) Twisted pair MAU link status
    Pin 2: (LED 2) Transmit status
    Pin 3: +5V
    Pin 4: (LED 3) Collision
    Pin 5: +5V
    Pin 6: (LED 4) Receive status

  Parallel Port 2 (26-pin header)

    Note that these connections are set up for use of a standard 26-pin
    header to a DB25 female mounted on a slot cover. This should be a
    standard part, but check connections before using it.

     Pin 1: *Strobe
     Pin 2: +5V Pull Up (Current limit unknown on Ariadne, normally 10 mA.)
     Pin 3: Data 0
     Pin 4: Unused
     Pin 5: Data 1
     Pin 6: *Reset
     Pin 7: Data 2
     Pin 8: Ground (Do not connect any of these grounds to a shield.)
     Pin 9: Data 3
    Pin 10: Ground
    Pin 11: Data 4
    Pin 12: Ground
    Pin 13: Data 5
    Pin 14: Ground
    Pin 15: Data 6
    Pin 16: Ground
    Pin 17: Data 7
    Pin 18: Ground
    Pin 19: *Acknowledge
    Pin 20: Ground
    Pin 21: Busy
    Pin 22: Ground
    Pin 23: Paper Out
    Pin 24: Ground
    Pin 25: Select
    Pin 26: Unused

    Parallel Port 1 (DB25 Female)
    Parallel Port 2 (DB25 Female when connected)
      Both Ariadne parallel ports have the same pin-out as the standard A4000
      parallel port.

Thanks to Greg Scott (National Amiga)