leech Posted July 4 Share Posted July 4 Was just randomly thinking... why did Atari pick VME (crippled and proprietary at that)? Commodore had Zorro 3 in the A3000 release around the same time. The other choice seems to have been the old ISA bus (which I don't think would have worked, being 16bit?) Would have been an interesting thing if Motorola themselves had added an expansion bus themselves that Apple, Atari, Commodore, etc all adopted. Though funny enough that looks like VME at some point, but no one but Atari tried to adopt that, and they implemented it only partially from my very limited understanding. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
351cougar Posted July 4 Share Posted July 4 was it being used / worked on on other designs at that time? maybe ongoing work ans a stock of connectors made the decision easier to swallow for marketing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leech Posted July 4 Author Share Posted July 4 33 minutes ago, 351cougar said: was it being used / worked on on other designs at that time? maybe ongoing work ans a stock of connectors made the decision easier to swallow for marketing. You are proba ly right as far as cost saving. Looks like VMEbus was first released in 1987. Which one would think that others would have picked that up... though I think the flat PCB with edge connectors would be cheaper for developers to make expansion boards. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+poobah Posted July 4 Share Posted July 4 VME was super common for Motorola 680x0 based industrial and scientific embedded systems (and PowerPC later on). They didn't have to reinvent the wheel, and theoretically, could leverage cards from other systems. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leech Posted July 4 Author Share Posted July 4 (edited) 1 hour ago, poobah said: VME was super common for Motorola 680x0 based industrial and scientific embedded systems (and PowerPC later on). They didn't have to reinvent the wheel, and theoretically, could leverage cards from other systems. Yeah, which begs the question, why they didn't do a full implementation, and why did none of the other consumer level machines adopt it? Edited July 4 by leech Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Sauron Posted July 4 Share Posted July 4 2 minutes ago, leech said: Yeah, which begs the question, why they didn't do a full implementation, and why did none of the other consumer level machines adopt it? The two systems that Atari had with VME weren't marketed at consumers, but rather at similar or the same types of customers that bought Sun workstations or other 68K-based workstations that used VME. As for why they didn't do a full implementation, that's because it was Atari, and they probably cheaped out on it somehow in order to save a few pennies on production costs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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