8 Dec
2011
8 Dec
'11
4:47 p.m.
Hi All,
I'm thinking of building a "somewhat vintage" two-channel DAC board,
intended to drive an oscilloscope as a vector display. I'm just considering
parts now, unless someone has a really good design already set to build.
By "somewhat vintage" what I mean is that I don't want to just drop in
a modern "super chip" that will have ten (or more) times the power of the
intended host computer which, by the way, is an SWTPc 6800. I figure the
board will have some 8-bit processor on it. I'm leaning towards a Z-80.
It will have an EPROM, some scratch static RAM, some glue logic to manage
the communication with the SS-30 bus... and this is where I get fuzzy... a
1Kx8 dual ported static RAM and two DACs. These last two elements (the
dual ported SRAM and the DACs) are where I don't have any experience. A
little googling has led me to the IDT7130 for the dual ported SRAM and the
DAC0830 for the DACs. Does anybody in cctalk land have experience with
either or both of these chips? I have a source for the DAC0830, but I don't
have a source for the IDT7130 yet. The basic idea of the design is for the
6800 to write a vertex list into the dual ported SRAM which the Z-80 then
reads and pushes to the DACs. I'm hoping I can just hang these chips off of
the Z-80 address and data busses like the RAM and EPROM but I need to do
some more reading of the spec sheets.
Any help greatly appreciated,
Bill S.