Dave McGuire wrote: Yup, pretty cool. I want to eventually build my own 68k machine from scratch. A friend lent me "Microprocessor System Design: 68000 Hardware, Software, and Interfacing" by Alan Clements. I bought my own copy within a couple days. Fantastic read!! Doesn't skimp on the details. Very relevant for my electronic studies (which are loosely tied to the Amiga) I applaud "Make" too, I just hate paying $15 newsstand price for their darn magazines. I'm ordering a subscription which is significantly cheaper.... Keith

On 17 Feb 2010 at 22:48, Ben wrote: Sadly, I didn't keep it sometime among my house moves. Just goes to demonstrate the power of parental suggestion. I'll always remember Dad for that, even though he's been gone 27 years this July. I mean, he could have showed me how to mine coal or clean septic tanks instead. --Chuck

There are plenty of stuctures you can build with glued playing cards that are not self-supporting. So having a glued structure doens't prove you made it without glue first. Do not putt potting compound on it. It's almost certain some will 'wick' into the contacts and cause them to go open. It'll never work again. The best way to preserve it is, of course, to solder it up on a bit of stripboard. You really do want to read the 'Impoverished Radio Experimenter' books. You still build real bradboards in there, valves in screew-termianl octal relay sockets, home-wound coils, etc. Oj, bnt you do ahve to solder some of the connections :-) -tony

On Feb 18, 2010, at 2:03 PM, Tony Duell wrote: Yep, looks like a 68008. Cool stuff! Oh come on. I've been using these things for...jeeze, 33 years now. They're not THAT unreliable. Seriously. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On 2/18/2010 3:58 PM, Ethan Dicks wrote: Send me one and I'll hack in an SD interface complete with FAT support :-) Heck, I could even put it on the serial port, if you didn't want to hack it in. 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

I must have been unlucky. I tried several of them in my younger days (Eurobreadboars, the CSC/GSC Protoboards, etc) and had no end of problems. In the end I started just soldering upo the circuits on stripboard, and my desigens started working first time. Oh, I still use them. Just not for anything where a momentary loss of contact is going to cause major problems (and be hard to tell from a real design fault), or that uses high-speed devices, or... Last time I used one was a couple of weeks ago to test out some white LEDs[1]. It was great for that, but I didn't design the rest of the circuit using it. [1] The local pound shop (a similar concept to dollar stores) was selling a camping lamp with 24 white LEDs for a pound. Needless to say I bought a couple to strip the LEDs from. I wanted to see if you could use white LEDs to make a useable stroboscope. You can. I built 2 such devices, one using a 7555 tinmer as the oascillator with 4000-series CMOS dividers (this one can be set for any rate between 3Hz and 3kHz, I measure the frequency using the Hz range of my Fluke multimeter), the other using a crystal oscillator and 74HC dividers to give either 100 or 120 flashes per second (simulating European or American mains lights). I wanted the former to check the performance of a motor I'd just rewond for an HP9125A plotter, the latter to checking the spindle speed of floppy drives, etc -- it gives a much clearer pattern than the lighting in my workshop. Oh, I didn't . I noticed it was a 0.6" wide package. The 68000 and 68010 DIL packages are 0.9" wide. Indeed. There is also a PGA version of the 68010, which is used in some HP machines IIRC there's a 68012 which had more addres mins bought out, but otherwise had the same PGA pinout IIRC, the 68010 pushes more onto the stack on an interrupt. The 68020 stack frame is the same as the 68010 one, so upgrading from a 68010 to a 68020 should involve few, if any, software changes. -tony