On 21 Mar 2012 at 12:12, David Riley wrote:
Pertec is a pretty simple interface with handshake
lines. I would
imagine you shouldn't have much trouble. An FPGA may be overkill
(certainly harder to work with 5v); you may find it even easier to
just use a microcontroller. My Cipher F880 runs on just a Z80
internally, nothing fancier than that.
I believe the 990 uses 2 Z8002 CPUs and the 995 uses a Z8002 +
80C186, so definitely more horsepower is useful.
Still, instead of a plain old Arduino, why not use a Digilent Uno32?
Costs little more than a Arduino, but runs at 80MHz, 32-bit words and
lots more I/O (most of it is 5V tolerant). Digitlent has done a
great job of taking the C IDE and making appear very nearly identical
to the 8-bit AVR based one.
Move up to a standalone PIC32 chip and you get DMA channels and up to
128K of on-chip RAM.
--Chuck