Minimig (was new non-x86 mobos)

* On Wed, Jan 06, 2010 at 02:10:40PM -0600, Brian Lanning <brianlanning at gmail.com> wrote: The C-One is a really interesting project. I got one last year. Probably the most interesting thing about it is that it's something of a mystery! The original project was designed by Jeri Ellsworth (of the C64 DTV project), but the schematics and design docs were permanently lost and Jeri moved on to new projects. Even now, the maintainers are making new discoveries about how the damn thing is put together and how to write cores for it. They're reverse-engineering their own product. Like in the "good old days", over the life of the project various corrections and hacks have been made to the existing boards. If you buy one you'll notice traces have been dremeled out and jumpers added here and there, and there have been other "patches" released since I bought mine. I hope someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but it's my understanding that they can't make new boards without doing a complete re-layout because of the lost design files. Another oddity: Even though it comes with a hardware 65816, none of the existing cores make any use of it. It is purely vestigial. One of the better changes was the addition of an extender card with a second, larger FPGA to give core developers access to more overall logic. It's allowed the C-One to be an excellent Minimig platform, with a fully in-FPGA 68000 implementation. If you want a really cool FPGA hacking board, I still recommend it. Just don't go into it expecting a polished finished product (They're very up-front and honest about this on the website when you go to buy.) -Seth