Subject: MINI-REVIEW: Vortex Golden Gate 486SLC PC/AT Emulator
From: [email-masked] (Dave K. Martin)
Date: 4 Jan 1993 21:52:05 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews

PRODUCT NAME

	Vortex Golden Gate 486SLC PC/AT Emulator

BRIEF DESCRIPTION

	The Vortex Golden Gate 486SLC is an IBM AT-Emulator for Amiga
2000/3000/4000 systems.  It uses a 25 MHz 80486SLC CPU.  The emulator is a
Bridgeboard style card which plugs into a "bridge" slot to access both the
Amiga Zorro bus and the IBM ISA bus on the Amiga motherboard.

AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION

   GERMANY
	Name:		Vortex Computersysteme GMBH
	Address:	Falterstrasse 51-53
			D-7101 Flein

	Telephone:	+49-7131-59720
	FAX:		+49-7131-55063

   USA
	Name:		Vortex Worldwide Branch Office
	Address:	3835 Richmond Ave. Suite 138
			Staten Island, NY 10312

	Telephone:	718-967-1509
	FAX:		718-948-0893

	E-mail:		Compuserve:	100015,330
			Internet:	[email-masked]

LIST PRICE

        Vortex Golden Gate 486SLC             $1099.00 (US dollars)
        Optional HD Floppy Disk Controller    $  89.00 (US dollars)

SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS

	HARDWARE

		One free bridge slot.
		One megabyte of Amiga ram.

		Amiga hard drive is not required.  Amiga 68020/30/40
		accelerator cards are supported but are not required.

	SOFTWARE

		AmigaDOS 1.3 and 2.x are supported.

		No MS-DOS system software is supplied with the Golden Gate
		486SLC.  MS-DOS versions 3.2 up to 5.0 and DR-DOS versions
		5.0 and 6.0 have been run successfully by Vortex.

COPY PROTECTION

	None.

	The Amiga software for the Golden Gate 486SLC installs on a hard
	disk using the provided installation program.

MACHINE USED FOR TESTING

	I installed and tested the Golden Gate 486SLC in the following Amiga
system:

	Amiga 2000 with rev 4.3 motherboard.
	ECS AGNES and DENISE chips.
	One MB of chip RAM, seven MB of 16-bit fast RAM.
	Commodore A2320 display enhancer with Commodore A1960 monitor.
	Commodore A2091 SCSI controller with a Quantum 105 megabyte hard
	drive.
	Microbotics 8-UP! memory card.
	CSA Mega-Midget Racer 68030 accelerator board with two MB of
	32-bit dynamic RAM.
	Kickstart 2.04 ROM version 37.175 and Workbench version 37.67.

The Vortex Golden Gate 486SLC was configured with:

	The optional High Density floppy disk controller was installed.
	The optional math coprocessor chip was not installed.
	Eight megabytes of memory were installed (two four MB SIMMS).
	All hardware jumpers on the board were left in the default
	configuration.
	MS-DOS 5.0 system software was used for all tests.

MINI-REVIEW

	  The Vortex Golden Gate 486SLC board that I ordered finally arrived.
After playing with it for a few hours, I was going to try to post my initial
impressions of the board.  After a couple of abortive attempts, I realized
that there is just too much to cover without doing a full review.  After I
get a little more time with it, I will write a full review for c.s.a.reviews.
Until then, here are the major highlights:

o	The Vortex Golden Gate 486SLC is based on the 486SLC processor chip.
	This processor uses a 32 bit internal and 16 bit external data bus
	much like the Motorola 68000 processor.  The 486SLC has 1 KB cache
	on the chip (opposed to the 4KB cache on a 486SX/DX processor).  The
	486SLC is compatible with the 486SX command set and is up to 2.4
	times faster than a 386SX with the same clock frequency.

o	The board is well made, mostly surface mount components with no cross
	connects or wires.

o	The Vortex Golden Gate 486SLC comes with 2 MB of RAM installed.  Up
	to 16 MB of RAM may be installed on board.

o	Sockets are provided on board for the optional high density floppy
	disk controller and math coprocessor chip.

o	The board includes a built in IDE hard drive interface.  A cable is
	included.

o	An internal floppy disk connector is on board (the optional floppy
	controller chip is required) along with a DB-25 connector on the
	back panel for external floppy disk drives.  A DB-9 connector is
	also on the back panel for the optional Monitor Master switch.

o	The 486SLC has a small heat sink, but it never got more than mildly
	warm.  My A2000 has a fan that blows down the card slots, however.

o	The manual is for the 386SX and 486SLC boards and has German,
	English, and French sections.  Each section is about 117 pages
	long.  The diagrams and photographs are excellent.  The installation
	and configuration sections are well organized, although careful
	reading is essential for some configuration options.

o	For use in A2000's, a small adapter is included that goes into the
	68000 socket, and the 68000 is plugged into the adapter.  The adapter
	only has a capacitor connected across two pins, nothing else.

o	Hardware installation was easy:  plug the card in, and connect the
	floppy drive cable.

o	The Amiga side software has a hard disk install program.  Just click
	on the icon.

o	A disk is included containing MS-DOS programs for installing and
	formatting hard drives, file transfers between the Amiga and Golden
	Gate, etc.

o	With the optional floppy disk controller chip installed, the Golden
	Gate can control drives in all of the standard sizes from 360KB up
	to 2.88 MB. (Each of the 3 floppy drives has 31 possible options
	that can be configured!)  Setting up all of the possible options in
	SETUP could be a challenge.

o	Any Amiga floppy drive can be configured to operate as either a 40
	track (360K) or 80 track (720K) floppy drive for the Golden Gate
	card.  The floppy drives then work as normal Amiga drives until the
	Golden Gate window is activated.  Then the floppy acts as a IBM
	drive (no connecting cable is used).  The Amiga still controls the
	disk from commands passed from the Golden Gate board via the Zorro
	bus.  Read/Write speeds are quite acceptable but are affected by the
	presence of an Amiga accelerator.

o	Hard drives can be emulated by directly assigning an Amiga hard drive
	partition or an Amiga file as an MS-DOS hard drive.  These emulated
	drives may be used in combination along with a drive on the internal
	IDE controller.  A dedicated Amiga partition works almost as fast as
	the IDE drive on my system.

o	I connected a 42M IDE drive connected to the built in controller on
	the Golden Gate board and it works quite well.  A connector on the
	Golden Gate board is provided for an IDE drive activity LED.

o	The 486SLC seems to co-exist peacefully with my Mega-Midget Racer (I
	did not install the adapter due to lack of clearance )

o	So far, I've only used the CGA video emulation.  There are 27
	different emulated video modes that can be configured, ranging from
	four-color CGA to monochrome (two color) VGA.  Four and eight color
	text only VGA modes are also emulated.  All emulated video modes can
	be displayed by a Commodore 1084 or equivalent monitor.

o	The basic VGA card from my 2088 Bridgeboard works with the Golden
	Gate.  Inserting a video card in any of the ISA bus slots
	automatically disables the emulated display.

o	I have not tried to share RAM between the Amiga and 486SLC yet.
	There are jumpers on the Golden Gate board to configure two or four
	MB of memory to be used as Amiga fast RAM.

o	Setup options for the Golden Gate allow up to 50% of Amiga RAM to be
	used as memory for the emulator.  This can be split between Chip,
	Fast, or public Amiga memory.

o	There is a "server mode" where the Amiga can directly access the RAM
	and disk drives of the Golden Gate board, but this appears to only
	support diskettes that have been formatted on the hi-density drives
	in AmigaDOS.  It does not appear as if hi-density MS-DOS disks can be
	read.  (Major bummer!)

o	The Amiga mouse is emulated as a serial Microsoft mouse.  No mouse
	driver for MS-DOS is provided, however.

o	The Amiga serial port can be used by the Golden Gate as either COM1
	or COM2.  If the Golden Gate board is active, it appears to
	interfere with using the serial port for the Amiga even if the
	Golden Gate is not using the serial port.

o	The Amiga's parallel port can be used as LPT1 or LPT2 by the Golden
	Gate.  I have not noticed any contention for the parallel port so
	far.

o	Windows 3.1 (The little bit I've tried so far) runs quite well on
	the Vortex Golden Gate 486SLC -- quite a bit better than on a 16 MHz
	386SX system.

o	I have not tried any real speed tests, but a quick check revealed the
	Vortex Golden Gate 486SLC to be approximately 2.5 times faster than
	a 16 MHz 386SX system.

CONCLUSIONS

	These are my initial impressions.  Careful configuration (and a
thorough review of the manual) may change some of these observations.  So
far though, I am quite pleased with the board, its quality, and the way it
installed.

December 1992,
Dave Martin - [email-masked]

	Golden Gate is a registered trademark of Vortex Computersysteme GmbH.

	Amiga, Bridgeboard and Commodore are registered trademarks of
	Commodore Electronics Limited.

	AT and IBM are registered trademarks of International Business
	Machines Corporation.

	MS-DOS, Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft
	Corporation.

---

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