Vortex Golden Gate 386SX, User Manual

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2. Introducing Golden Gate
When our engineers designed Golden Gate, it was an essential aim to achieve
the best possible integration of the emulator into the existing Amiga system
environment.
Golden Gate is able to use almost all components of the
Amiga
for Its
emulation and provide them under MS-DOS: Amiga RAM, Amiga floppy disk
drives, Amiga hard disk drives, Amiga video controller and monitor,
Amiga
serial and parallel interfaces, Amiga mouse and keyboard.
Another aim we wanted to achieve was to provide Golden Gate itself with
various options for expansions. Thus Golden Gate provides a PC/AT RAM
expansion, that can be expanded to up to 16MB (512KB on Golden Gate/2 MB
on Golden Gate 486SLC factory installed). 4MB of which can be used as an
autoconfiguring Amiga RAM expansion. Further Golden Gate has an !DE hard
disk interface for a fast MS-DOS !DE hard disk drive, an optional floppy
controller for high density floppy disk drives and a socket for a 80C387SX
25MHz coprocessor.
For the emulation Golden Gate uses both the components of the Amiga as
well as its own onboard expansions. The strategies by which Golden Gate can
use these system resources will be further explained on the following pages.
2.1 All you need Is RAM
Just as any real PC/AT computer Golden Gate, too, needs RAM to live on.
In difference to the memory organization of the Amiga with its continuous
address space and Amiga-DOS, the PC/AT and MS-DOS can control 640KB base
memory (also called conventional memory) and above this limit two further
different types of memory, the extended memory and expanded memory. Golden
Gate puts all three types of PC/AT memory at the user's disposal just like on a
real PC/AT computer. The RAM required for this can be both in the Amiga (on
the motherboard or on a Zorro slot RAM expansion) and on Golden Gate
itself.
User's Manual Golden Gate
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