afx

AFX (also A/FX) was the name of a line of slot car racing sets made by Aurora during the 1970s and early 1980s. AFX was the most popular line of "HO"-scale slot cars during that time. Several of the AFX sets featured the likeness of racing legend Jackie Stewart.

Through the AFX line, Aurora demonstrated such slot-car innovations as Magna-Traction, in which the motor magnets create downforce by pulling against the conducting rails embedded in the AFX tracks, enabling the cars to take corners faster; G-Plus, an enhanced version of Magna-Traction with larger magnets oriented to create greater downforce; and Ultra 5, a slotless car that uses magnets and solenoids to "sense" when the cars are drifting out of their lanes and steer them back.

While the Magna-Traction cars were effective, the G-Plus cars were a phenomenal improvement in mass-market slot-car handling for that time. G-Plus cars generated such downforce that, for many cars, it became impossible to unseat them through a curve, even at top speed.

AFX was also an expansion bus used on the Sun SPARCstation 5, and curiously, only on that system and the SPARCstation 4. In both cases it was used only for graphics cards, and only one, the Turbo CX, was ever produced. The SPARCstation 4 had its TCX built in, with only 2MB of RAM, providing accelerated 8-bit color graphics at 1152x864. The SPARCstation 5 could use it as an expansion card, which was shared with the leftmost (from the front) SBus slot. This version was more capable, with 4MB of RAM, and could provide 24-bit color. Curiously, the AFX bus was used for nothing else, and was never used again. The SPARCstation 20 and SPARCstation 10SX used the SX/CG14 framebuffer, which was internally similar to the TCX, but used the SBus instead of AFX (despite being wired to the motherboard in both cases). The AFX slot itself looked almost identical to the male version of the MBus connector, and was notable for being one of very few expansion slot types to have the male portion on the motherboard.