Commodore A2286 AT Bridgeboard The Commodore A2286 AT Bridgeboard is basically a PC-AT on a card, meant to be used in any of the 'big box' Amiga's such as the A2000, A3000, or A4000. It is a Zorro-II board which acts as a 'bridge' between the Zorro slots in the Amiga and the ISA slots inline with them, and in fact the A2286 actually plugs into both slots. With the bridgeboard installed it is possible to utilize ISA expansion cards, including video, from within the PC software running on the bridgeboard's cpu. It contains an 80286 cpu running at 8mhz, an onboard floppy controller, 1024k of RAM, PC-AT compatible BIOS, and an optional 80287 math coprocessor socket. The Bridgeboard emulates the PC-XT keyboard using the Amiga's keyboard and the PC's parallel port using the Amiga's parallel port, as well as IBM PC MDA or CGA graphics if there is no ISA video card installed. The onboard floppy controller is capable of supporting both 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drives in both low and high density formats, and in fact the A2286 normally shipped with a 1.2meg high density 5.25" drive. There were also bridgeboards made which had either an 8088 or 80386SX cpu. All of the Commodore Bridgeboard's shipped with Janus library software, which provided the interface between the Amiga user and the 80x86 cpu, version 2.1 being the latest.

Interestingly, since the bridgeboards enable the use of the ISA slots inline with the Zorro slots in 'big box' Amiga's, there have been a number of drivers written which allow the use of certain ISA cards from the Amiga side as well, such as networking cards.

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