Help! I am running an ARCnet (and I like it!). I am trying to find: 1) Anyone have any information as to the eletectrical characteristics of ARCnet signals??? (I want to bread board up a PCI NIC). 2) Anyone have any old ARCnet cards they wanna get rid of??? Thanks, Arfon

Okay, here's another hair-brained project that I am working on..... I am trying to basically build a 64Bit Z-80 on a board. What I am looking for is: Anyone know of any chips that are EXTREMELY simple micro-controllers but, work at EXTREMELY high clock rates??? I wanna put a few on a board with some memory and made a 64-bit Z-80. I'd like the processor to operate at 300Mcyc (or faster) clock speeds so, I figure I need micro-controllers that operate at about 900 Mcyc to do the work. Any ideas???? Thanks, Arfon

You guys are really raining on my parade.... I have looked at Z180's, Z380's and etc.... They are SLOW!!!!!! The only availabe packaging for the Z380 is un-useable to me as a hobbist (without a lot of headache.) I hate the way that Zilog has taken the nice and simple control bus scheme of the Z-80 and really made it a pain-in-the-butt on the Z-380!. So, If some company would take the Z-bus (but with an (input/output) data size set of bus control lines), Z-80 instruction set and match a DEC Alpha performance (at a cheap price of-course), I would worship that company. (Oh yes, I want a 64bit data bus and a 128bit address bus). Is this asking for too much? Why can't we all just get along? Since this is a dream: My thoughts are this: If I can find some REALLY SIMPLE mirco-controllers that do just the basic microprocessor functions, I can parallel them to make them read-in and intrepret Z-80 code. I cannot see why massively populated microprocessors (like the PPC, Intel, and DEC Alpha) can reach clock speeds of 600 Mcyc and a really simple (one accumulator, bare instruction set) microcontroller can't exceed those speeds! If I got some of these micro-controllers and had two or three of them reading in instructions ahead of execution (looking for branches) I could do half of the job and speed up the through-put. Then use several more u-controllers acting in parallel to actually do the instruction execution. For math, a bunch of stinking fast memory locations acting as look-up tables. Any ideas?

At 12:10 PM 10/22/98 -0700, you wrote: tables. NOW YOU'RE TALKING!!!!! Anyone wanna help me solder some Diode ROM boards!?!?! Arfon "Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning." -- Rich Cook

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Hi, I have never tho't of the Z80 as a slow processor. I interfaced a Z180 running at 18 mhz to a VGA board recently and using a C compiler was able to build a machine that acted essentially like a 80286 running at 10 mhz. The system was compact and inexpensive, with lots of i/o options and such. A Z80 running at 200 mhz would be a phenomenal performer. If you have cash, you can find Z80 cores in verilog these days. A Z80 with MMU (a la Z180) rounds out to about 8k gates in logic. This being the case, you can fit it into a single FPGA with lotsuv room to spare. You could prototype in Verilog on an FPGA and turn a few custom chips if that's what you want. Z80 is a pretty cool platform for building an extremely cheap and modern network computer since it acts a lot like a 16 bit processor. There's a lot you can do with it with a relatively minimal effort. Why not look at doing your own Z80 in a Xilinx or Altera part? Obviously you can't get 200 mhz out of it unless you turn your own chip but you can get all of the flexibility you want in a fairly fast processor. Producing a custom chip is expensive but may be your only option if you want that ultra-fast Z80. Incidentally, these guys (see link below) have a board anyone can use for learning and building a Z80 on an FPGA. They have a board with a 20,000 gate FPGA for about $350 that looks interesting enough to get started on. I believe you can also gang them up in parallel for any weird projects you might have in mind. Keep in mind that because of routing issues, not all 20,000 gates are usable in a design. http://www.xess.com (click on other products) ---- Begin forwarded message: Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 09:45:58 -0500 Reply-To: classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu Sender: CLASSICCMP-owner(a)u.washington.edu From: Arfon Gryffydd &lt;ArfonRG(a)DIEspammerSCUM.Texas.Net&gt; To: "Discussion re-collecting of classic computers" &lt;classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu&gt; Subject: More thoughts on building a Z-80 (64bit!!!) In-Reply-To: &lt;19981022002017.2230.qmail(a)brouhaha.com&gt; X-Sender: arfonrg(a)texas.net X-Listprocessor-Version: 8.1 beta -- ListProcessor(tm) by CREN You guys are really raining on my parade.... I have looked at Z180's, Z380's and etc.... They are SLOW!!!!!! The only availabe packaging for the Z380 is un-useable to me as a hobbist (without a lot of headache.) I hate the way that Zilog has taken the nice and simple control bus scheme of the Z-80 and really made it a pain-in-the-butt on the Z-380!. <rest deleted>