Mostly by the bankruptcy of Commodore and the unfortunate name they got as gaming

computers due to the success of the C64. Nothing could beat the Amiga PC’s and their
home computer counterparts (A2000 PC/A500 HC*, A4000 PC/A1200 HC*) except for the
CGI in that time but the CGI was a bit too expensive for most people.

*These models have the same power but one was in a PC case (typically desktop with a
monitor on top but some tower models exist as well) and the other build into a keyboard.
The PC models could hold more extra cards. Where the keyboard type computers could
typically hold 1 card over the systembus most PC could hold 3 or more (Zorro) including
bridging to AT/XT.

Yes the Amiga PC’s could hardware emulate the 286, 386 and 486 and had several ISA
slots as well. Sounds fabulous but how does that work?

This is the motherboard of an Amiga A2000 (picture taken from the internet, for
educational purpose only).

See all those slots on the left side? The top left are 4 ISA slots of which the two most left
are 16 bit and the two to the right of that can be bridged and are also 16 bit. Under those
two right slots we see two other slots which are also ISA but 32 bit extension and on the
bridge rail.

Directly to the left of those two 32 bit extended ISA you see two unpopulated which can be
made available if your soldering skills are good enough. Doing so will make all of the ISA
slots 32 bit capable.

Those 5 slots at the bottom left are Zorro II slots. The leftmost two of them are meant for
bridging but could be used for only the Amiga side, the rest is for the Amiga side itself.

To the right of the Zorro slots is one other slot which is the systembus (32 bit). It can be
used for a co-processor or a real substitute for the processor itself for example. Mostly used
for PPC acceleration nowadays, you need to pull the processor in that case which is easy as
it is socketed.

Now that you know the layout of the ports we can get into bridging. Those 4 ISA slots plus
their 32 bit extensions are isolated from the rest of the computer except for current. You
can build a complete PC on there without using the rest of the computer. You could have
two separate systems in one box that way with two monitors, two keyboards and two mice.
You could however also buy a special piece of hardware called a ‘Bridgeboard’ which
connected the ISA to the Zorro II with a CPU and controller in between. This way you
could run the PC side in a window on your Amiga Workbench (AmigaOS) in real-time
with Round-robin multitasking and drag&drop.

I own a PPC accelerated Amiga A2000 with a 486 XT Cyrix 150 MHz Bridgeboard. It runs
about 72x faster than a stock A2000 measured in dhrystones. There is nothing more
satisfying than playing C&C on your Amiga hardware using Windows ’95 as second OS in
a maximized window.

Amiga, back when computing was fun.