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To: Peter Dufault <dufault@hda.com>
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Subject: Re: Fast a-d card 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 22 Aug 1997 17:06:53 -0400."
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Date: Sun, 24 Aug 1997 11:51:40 +0930
From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>
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> Can anyone suggest a fast (40Mhz) 8 bit PCI A-D card with flexible
> DMA hardware or on board smarts from a company that provides
> technical info and believes in life outside of Windows?  This could
> be anything from a good fast flexible board to a oscilloscope board
> to a combo DSP/A-D card.

Datel have a very nice board that I got _that_ close to getting to use 
recently.  The card itself provides the PCI interface & triggering, and 
there are a pile of plugin modules to choose from.

We were looking at the 16-channel 250KHz plugin, but I'm fairly sure 
there was a single-channel module at the 40MHz mark.

The card we were looking at was comfortably under the AUD$6000 mark; I 
don't think the plugins vary a great deal in price.

> A single channel, the ability to level trigger, and chaining of
> DMA buffers with configurable done interrupt are the minimum
> requirement.

The PCI interface on these cards is provided by the AMCC 9533 PCI 
Matchmaker; it has _most_ of what you want, but no DMA buffer chaining.
The card does have fairly deep FIFOs though, so you could probably do 
your buffer chaining manually without too much stress.  AMCC were 
more than happy to send me a copy of the databook for the 9533, and 
Datel were likewise open about programming their card; for about 
AUD$700 more we could have had the source to their DOS-based diagnostic/
test/harddisk-recorder program if we felt we needed examples.

You could try National Instruments, but getting data on their MITE PCI 
interface ASIC is like kicking dead whales down the beach with a jelly 
toothbrush nailed to a tree 8)

> PCI only - no ISA is available.

At 40MHz?  No shit 8)

mike