When the first BoXer was designed  it featured a number of ISA slots aswell as the Amiga standard Zorro slots. In recent times the BoXer has been revised and upgraded to feature 4 fully active PCI slots. In doing so the Zorro was removed from the motherboard. In recognizing that many users still still had stores of various Zorro cards and manufacturers were still designing and producing cards Mick decided to add a port to allow a Zorro daughter board to be connected to the BoXer Thus maintaining a degree of some backwards compatibility with legacy machines and it's Zorro associated hardware.

The BoXer features a connector to allow this daughter board to be implemented as an add-on board which when connected will sit behind the main board (The BoXer). According to Mick the bus board will feature its own onboard logic and will feature 2 by full compatible Zorro 2/3 connectors. (Previous to the 10th February the board was to contain 5.) What is still unknown is to whether it will be a direct connection or via some ribbon cable to allow it to be placed in varying locations depending on ATX casing requirements or a direct connection - board to board.

The bus board is not likely to be available upon the release of the main BoXer board as all efforts are focused upon the BoXer release. The Daughter board is still only in the design status.

While talking to Mick and Paul on IRC (Cologne) they seemed very confident that most if not all Zorro cards including graphics like the Picasso IV would work on the bus board. But do remember that if adding any type of Gfx card, rest assured that any PCI based gfx card will assuredly be much faster and should offer far more features - driver permitting.

So what off PPC. Well you may remember that Escena are still working on their dual G3/4 PPC card that's based on the Zorro extensions. According to Escena their card should still work so long as Mick "Assuming the Boxer follows the Zorro III specification, this should work from the hardware point of view. But please allow some time to pass for proper software support.
So even if we don't see an immediate release of a PPC card for the BoXer, Escena's Zorro PPC card would offer an alternative. Do remember that a dedicated PPC socket would take direct advantage of the BoXers 64bit design. Still, Escena's card does offer an alternative.

I hope to have some more information on this Zorro busboard soon and as soon as it's released i will add a table of as many tested Zoo cards as possible for compatibility issues.
 

Pictures
 
 

Specifications
 
 

Compatibility
 
 

Last Updated: 10th February 2000