|
|
|
Individual's Xsurf 3 Zorro Network Card Written by Brian Green (C) Brian Green, Particles! 
Individual's Xsurf3 Zorro Network card allows any Zorro-based Amiga to connect to a LAN via Ethernet easily and cheaply. Besides being a network card, it offers 2 Amiga 1200 compatible clock ports and a 40-pin IDE expansion. Individual offers many different expansion options to hook up to the clock ports including a sound card and fast serial bus amongst other things. The IDE channel does not support booting, DMA, or older, slower hard drives. The lack of DMA prevents you from using any sort of CD burner on this channel. Consider these expansion options a bonus and not the sole reason to buy this card. What's in the Box I got my card in quickly from GGSDATA of Sweden (www.ggsdata.se). It arrived in a non-descript box, complete with software on a label-less CDR and 2 sheets of paper - 1 is the documentation in German and the other is a fairly well translated guide for English. I was disappointed to see that there weren't any sort of drivers or anything on floppy-disk. It wasn't that the drivers wouldn't fit, all in all the total space for all of the drivers combined was just less than 200K. As I don't have a CD-ROM on this machine, I ended up transferring them to the Amiga via nullmodem cable from a PC. However, what's included on the CD is a setup program that's supposed to make the setup of the network card simple. Let's go into this. Setup The Xsurf3 fits nicely into any available Zorro slot and fit fine in my standard A3000D case. The setup wizard that's included is a very helpful program for absolute newbies or maybe for people that are not using Workbench 3.9. I found it too limiting, however. It copies the drivers to the appropriate places, however, when it pops up a requestor to select what IP range your Amiga will use, you're given the option of 9 IPS - 192.168.0.1 through 192.168.0.9. There isn't a way to fill one in manually. Since my IP range starts at 192.168.0.100 this program wasn't helpful at all. I ended up exiting the program and running the Workbench 3.9-included Genesis Setup Wizard instead which configured the card without any issues. The IDE drivers weren't included on the CD, so I hit Individual's website (www.jschoenfeld.com) and downloaded them from there. Installation of this was a matter of dragging the driver into your Expansion folder. That's it. On next boot the IDE channel was now active. Usage I've been using this card constantly for 2 months and I haven't had any issues with the card performing poorly. It is only a 10BT card, however, I do not believe that a faster card would matter much as I think at 100BT or above, the Amiga's Zorro bus wouldn't be able to keep up. I've connected the card to a variety of hubs and switches and it has performed flawless each time. Individual does include a PPoE driver but I did not test this as I have a router on my network instead. The IDE channel was a hit and miss for me. It refused to detect a newer 20GB Maxtor IDE drive on the channel or a 6GB Western Digital drive. It did detect a 13GB Maxtor IDE and Workbench 3.9 formatted the entire drive as a single partition without issue. The drive is a little slower than a SCSI drive hooked up directly to the SCSI controller of an A3000 but it was more than satisfactory for storing files or loading older games from it. I didn't have any way to test the clock ports on the card. Conclusion If you need an inexpensive way to get your big-box Amiga on your network, this is a great way to do it. Simple setup, flawless performing network operations, and extra bonus features make this card a great buy. Price: $119.00 (outside of Europe $95.20 without VAT)  GGSDataPros: Cons: |