13 May
2004
13 May
'04
2:07 a.m.
On Thu, 13 May 2004, Jochen Kunz wrote:
Well, a Spartan3 XC3S200 is about $16, has about 27K bytes of block RAM that
can be used as RAM or ROM, and you could fit at least a couple of 100 MHz
16 bit CPUs inside plus whatever other hardware was required. It would require
level shifters for the bus however.
Peter Wallace
Mesa Electronics
On Wed, 12 May 2004 23:30:49 +0100
Frank Arnold <fm.arnold(a)gmx.net> wrote:
You could do a very short (2 inches?) card to save PCB costs
A solid state disc would be a great solution,
however, wouldn't it be
a better (more general) aproach to work right off the unibus? That
would help anyone that -like me- has a unibus-cpu with nothing else
attached to it.
Sure. But who will fab the big, odd-shaped UniBus boards? Do you
have
enough UniBus transceiver chips in stock? If you have (?) the scematics of the RK611, how
much work would it be
to put this into a fpga-design and add connect this to a (better four)
CF-card socket(s) Then a cheap 32mb CF card would become a RK07+
media...
Hmmm. Replicating the RK611 in an FPGA is an interresting idea. - If you
can get complete shematics and there are no funky things like an AMD bit
slice CPU in it.
If you follow the RK611-design, there is no
bothering about driver
issues,
There isn't one if I use the original RK611 controler. That is an
other
issue: If you emulate the entire controler, you have to make the
emulation good enough for all operating systems. It may work for a
RK611, but what about a UDA50 with its AMD bit slice CPU or a controler
that has a T11 with some non-trivial firmware on it. You can't stick
this in a (cheap, small) FPGA. A project like this would be a perfect entry for
the VCFE of next
year, isn't it? (Hurry up, only 50 weeks left! :-)) )
Yes, that is where the
idea for this project was born. :-)
--
tschüß,
Jochen
Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/