RiscOS on SimTec SA233 EB110 development/eval board?

Hi,

I got my hands on a Simtec StrongARM 233 development/evaluation board, with 3x PCI, 5x ISA slots, 2x SDRAM. I guess it’s an EB110.

I used the search engine of least mistrust but weren’t really able to find some hints on how/which RiscOS could run on this board. And even if, would it support any PCI or ISA cards?

Regards
Götz

From memory, no version of RISC OS was ported to the simtec strongarm board.

PCI card support: there was a limited number of PCI cards in IYONIX and Omega that had drivers. Specific sound and network cards, multiport serial, USB and I think three variants of GeForce graphics cards. BT878 TV cards also had a prototype driver IIRC. The main problem on the IYONIX was that it needed “universal” cards for 3.3V and 5V, while many cards at that time were 5V only.

ISA card support: the RiscStation and the Mico had ISA slots, I think for the Mico there was an Ethernet card and for the RiscStation there was a prototype USB card.

Apart from the IYONIX stuff, I fear that most of the code for the drivers and for the OS interfacing is lost in the mist of times.

Thanks a lot for your answers. Not all hope is lost in terms of PCI cards for StrongARM machines, but my board isn’t in the lucky group, it seems. Most likely I will feed it with NetBSD and Linux :-)

(And use my A5000 and A3010 for my RiscOS fun)

The EB110, which appears to be the same as the CATS motherboard , was produced while Acorn still owned RISC OS. At that point they were still designing custom chips for VIDC and IOMD, to avoid having to modify the OS. So I don’t think RISC OS was ever on the cards, it was developed for NetBSD.

Having said that, it sounds pretty much like an Iyonix (same motherboard chip) but with a StrongARM instead of an XScale. So if anyone was sufficiently bored it probably wouldn’t be a lot of work. I’m sure there are more useful projects though :-)