Pictures showing the Quicknet Card (V1.2) with 10Base5 (thicknet) and 10Base2 (thinnet) options
Pictures showing the Quicknet Card (V1.2) with 10Base5 (thicknet) and 10Base2 (thinnet) options
Pictures showing the Quicknet Card (V1.2) with 10Base5 (thicknet) and 10Base2 (thinnet) and rare 10BaseT options
Hi Res Version of Front 10Base2/10Base5 (2000 x 719)
Hi Res Version of Back 10Base2/10Base5 (1012 x 370)
Hi Res Version of Front 10Base2/10Base5/10BaseT (2000 x 725)
Hi Res Version of Back 10Base2/10Base5/10BaseT (2000 x 745)
| Type | Ethernet |
| 10Base2 (BNC & Coax, ThinNet): | Yes |
| 10Base5 (AUI & Coax, ThickNet): | Yes |
| 10BaseT (RJ45 & UTP): | Yes |
| 100BaseTX (RJ45 & UTP): | No |
| SANA-II Driver: | Yes (built into ROM) |
| MNI Driver: | Yes (z2-mb86950.mni) |
| Other Driver: | Yes |
The QuickNet card is quite unique amongst Amiga ethernet cards. It contains an EPROM which holds both the SANA-II driver and custom QuickNet networking. You can choose which software you wish to use by selecting a jumper on the back of the card. The QuickNet software is a fast peer-to-peer networking solution designed for Amiga's on an ethernet network and allows hte sharing of drivers etc. It is unclear whether the QuickNet software sits on top of TCP/IP, but this is believed not to be the case. In addition to the software in the EPROM, there is additional software to be installed on the "master-server", which is the machine that is likely to be rebooted the least. You need to install the software only on this machine. The disk-sharing process for all "slave" machines is done completely from the master. Each board has its own "physical" address which is used to recognize the board on the network. Once the "master-server" is completely installed, all the "slave" machines will display a requester when they boot, containing a "username" and a "password" field. The slaves can use any of the drives exported by the server, just as if they were local disks. The device recognises the ".backdrop" icons of the WorkBench 2.x and all the snapshots made. The network is completely transparent to the user! For each user, you may set up different access levels, different configurations, and different shared disks. You should do this only on the "server" machine. If you need to make a machine, you need to change only the configuration of the "master-server" to add the address of the new board in the list. On some diskless machines, you may boot remotely from another machine on the network. You do not need a hard disk in any of the slaves. QuickNet has an ARexx port. It allows you to send ARexx scripts to other machines in the network! You may, for example, pilot a slideshow on all the machines on the network from a single machine. You could also use it in schools so the teacher may run tutorial software on the students' machines, etc. Additional information can be found here
The network card itselfs is a full length Zorro II card. The QuickNet software allows remote filesharing between two or more Amigas and actually supports the mounting of drives on another machine, which are themselves network drives (regardless of what protocol they use). The Quicknet Cards contain a switch which allows the ID to be toggled between 1 and 2 (V1.0 cards have 3 IDs). The MNI driver supports both IDs however it is highly recommended that you set it to 2 as this has much better performance. Some versions of the card may be fixed at ID 1 and cannot be changed. The card pictured on this page is version 1.2 which differs slightly from versionb 1.0 cards. As well as having only 2 ID's (V1.0 has 3) it has improved labelling and the part labelled 9-18V is labelled 12-9V on the older card. The number mentioned on the ROM is believed to be the number of QuickNet cards manufactured when it was made. Note: The QuickNet 2000 is available with various support for networking connectors, including all three types (10Base2, 10Base5, 10BaseT) so it depends on the particular card you have as to which connectors may be supported.
Adding UTP Support
If your Quicknet card does not support 10BaseT, you can upgrade the card by soldering the following items to the appropriate areas on the card:
2 x Capacitors
6 x Resistors
1 x PT4059 IC (or equivalent, eg Nan-Pulse or National)
1 x RJ45 Connector.
Thanks to Michael Czajka
