At 11:53 AM -0500 11/30/07, David Betz wrote: Wasn't this displayed at VCF-X? Zane -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet) | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |

David Betz wrote: Robert Bernardo sent an email prior to VCF noting that Sellam was looking for some volunteers to chat about this project. I threw my name in the hat, and this is what I got back: (more after the include) -------------------------------------------------- Hi James and Jim and Robert. It is too late to revive the project in time for the VCF this weekend, but I would definitely like to move forward with it and am thinking about presenting this at an as yet completely perliminary idea for a vintage computer music event sometime next year. The guy I had working on it (Michael Belanger) had the design advanced to the point where he had several C64 units connected and could pass data between them. About 6 weeks ago he disappeared. I assume he either got very busy or fled to Canada or something. At any rate, the design he was focusing on used the User Port and the keyboard port to make a bi-directional 8-bit data path. I wanted him to not use the keyboard port as I thought there were plenty of other ports to use (like the joysticks). Plus, we don't need a full 8-bits of datapath. 4 is fine; even serial will suffice. The network architecture we settled on was a token ring type. The C64s would be connected in a loop. We didn't flesh out the network operation fully before Michael vanished, so that still needs some work. My preference is to not introduce any extra hardware into this. I want it to be done with stock C64s. The only hardware I would add is a carthridge with the NOS on it plugged into each CPU so we don't have to manually boot the system node by node. Anyway, there's still a lot of work to be done. I guess we can just start interested in the project. The ultimate goal is to make a cluster that can perform general purpose computations that would benefit from parallelization, such as graphics rendering (fractals anyone)? And of course to turn it into a 192 voice SID synthesizer. I already have a couple artists who want to use it to compose. Let me first get through the VCF this weekend and then we'll start on this project in earnest. ---------------------------------------- I looked online for some information, given the name and the project name. I found a few snippets on the Lemon64 forum, but nothing of specific nature. I then asked the CBM-Hackers group for some ideas, and we tore through some ideas. I agree with Sellam's concern about opening up the 64 and using so much IO. Although some parallel approaches were discussed, the group consensus trended towards using the two CIA SPI ports available on the user port, which would provide very good throughput, and minimal wiring. Beyond that, I have heard nothing from Sellam, though I am eager to help. I had design notes here for the same project lying here, in the pile of things "neat to do at some point" anyway. On the CBM-Hackers discussion, there was not consensus between peer2peer and master/slave (or whatever the politically correct term for it would be), and discussion died down. Even though I was not sure about the SPI approach early in the discussions, I do believe it is the best way to go with the number of machines involved. But, the collision avoidance/detection solution eluded us. I had not thrown it out here as yet, but I am open to ideas, as it is a personal itch to scratch, especially if it does not involve much HW. Jim -- Jim Brain, Brain Innovations (X) brain at jbrain.com Dabbling in WWW, Embedded Systems, Old CBM computers, and Good Times! Home: http://www.jbrain.com