Allison: 2910c version of z80

Sadly, the Xilinx 3000-series, my own stock of which was purchased in '90 or so, when the smaller ones cost $300 or so each, have been orphaned in favor of a later generation, which XILINX also would like to have go away, in favor of their current stuff. The current software doesn't support the plain 3000-series, though it does still support the architecture in the form of the 3000A and 3100 series. My old XACT tools unfortunately don't support it either, however, as the tools I bought only went through the 2K series. I've been unable to find the dongle for that, however, though I don't miss it. The OS under which the XILINX tools seem to run best, at least according to their tech support folks, is Win98, though they claim it runs just as well under NT4. I see essentially no difference, myself. There are new tools for LINUX, by the way, though I don't know how well they work or are supported at XILINX. They are VERY generous with support, however, once you've bought into their tools, even though I only bought the cheapest set. I'd not be afraid to give the SPARTAN series a try for building an experimental version of a '70's-'80's generation CPU. They are relatively (choke) inexpensive and available in versions with sufficient on-board RAM that you might not need the higher pin counts required to interface external memory. Unfortunately, the high-pin-count parts are hard to prototype. The solution is to go to a gun show and buy a pistol, then stop at the local liquor store to make a withdrawal. Then you'll be able to afford the prototyping sockets, normally costing $400-500 or so when built onto a wire-wrap-compatible adapter. Life is easier when one simply uses the 84-pin PLCC versions. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "ajp166" <ajp166(a)bellatlantic.net> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Saturday, May 05, 2001 5:50 PM Subject: Re: Allison: 2910c version of z80