News Special: BoXeR

It has now been quite some time since news first came out about the BoXeR, a fully Amiga compatible motherboard being produced by Access Information. In that time the project has suffered various delays, some to do with the problematic situation in the Amiga market, and others to do with a desire to improve the specification of the product.

At last BoXeR is nearing completion. The final board design is due to enter prototyping within the next few days, and a prototype board should be on display at the stand of distributor Blittersoft at the World of Amiga show in London on the 24th to 25th of July. It is quite likely that the board will not be fully functional by the time of the show.

Updated specification

The main reason for the delays in BoXeR is a radical redesign which will provide a significantly more up-to-date and powerful motherboard than has been previously announced. The board pictured here was the original motherboard design intended to be a modernised A4000 - the new BoXeR contains a far more powerful feature set, close to what had been mooted for the BoXeR 2 in the past.

Probably the most obvious improvement is the inclusion on the motherboard of 4 fully active PCI slots, which will enable BoXeR owners to expand their machine with cheap but powerful PCI cards. Although we will have to wait and see which cards will have drivers written for them, we can expect to see SCSI cards, cheap 100MBit Ethernet, powerful soundcards, internal modems and low cost but phenomenally powerful graphics cards such as the Voodoo Banshee which provides better than BlizzardVisionPPC performance for well under �100. However the improvements do not stop there.

High speed DMA I/O transfer means that most peripherals will work at high speeds with lower CPU overheads - you'll be able to use fast serial and parallel devices, UDMA hard drives and so on. This, along with ATX formfactor, DIMM sockets and PS/2 peripheral compatibility, will make the BoXeR a very powerful and cheap to expand system.

BoXeR is also designed to bring the more specifically Amiga aspects of the architecture up to date. The thing that is most likely to please and surprise the Amiga faithful is that the BoXeR has a highly integrated single chip replacement for the AGA chipset, which is feature compatible but will include significant enhancements, including for the first time a total removal of the Chip RAM barrier. A 64 bit wide connector for a PowerPC expansion card will also allow a cheap solution for future upgrades to G3 or even G4 processors.

The latest specifications for the BoXeR motherboard are as follows:

• 100% Amiga compatible.
• ATX motherboard based on Amiga technology - fits in standard PC Desktop/Tower case..
• Motorola 68040 or 68060 at 25-75MHz supported in a single processor socket..
• Highly integrated single chip chip-set, AGA feature compatible but with performance enhancements..
• Most peripherals support high speed DMA transfers, increasing throughput while reducing processor overhead..
• No CHIP RAM limits..
• 2 x DIMM sockets for combined use as FAST/CHIP..
• Dual IDE Hard disk interface, supports fast IDE modes..
• Flash ROM 2Mb, 32 bit wide. Used for boot ROM's and resident modules..
• Hi-Density floppy disk drive interface, uses standard PC floppy drives..
• CD-ROM audio input connector and mixer..
• Real Time Clock..
• Keyboard port for standard low cost PC PS/2 keyboard..
• Mouse port for standard low cost PC PS/2 mouse..
• 4 x Active PCI slots..
• Amiga Video slot..
• Expansion connector to support 5xZorro 3 slots..
• Connector for full 64-bit PowerPC expansion card..

• Printer port..
• RGB video..
• PS/2 Keyboard..
• PS/2 Mouse..
• Serial port..
• Amiga Joystick port..
• Stereo audio..
• IDE - 40 pin (Dual) header.
• Floppy drive DF0:/DF1: header.