On Sat, 12 Apr 2008, Jeff Walther wrote:
Actually, that project was just to clone the Grayscale
adapter card.
It did not include the frame buffer main card. The main card was
based on a custom chip by Micron--not an FPGA unfortunately. So the
chances of cloning it without having to redesign the bulk of the
logic is nill.
Now, it really shouldn't be that hard to whip something up with an
FPGA and either some fastish SRAM or an open core DDR2 controller and
one DDR2 memory chip. However, figuring out all the ins and outs
of properly interfacing to the Mac OS of the time has had me slowed
and stopped for a while. It's probably not all that difficult, but
it is tedious and there is a lot of information to sort through. One
of the hardest parts is knowing which information I actually need.
For every useful tidbit I find, I've gone through 20 chunks of old
Mac knowledge which don't apply but were in the way.
How far did you get with this project? I'd love to see something that
just does greyscale. That and smaller modern parts would allow a lot more
to be crammed into that PDS slot.
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at
cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?