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First development card

dh219 edited this page Dec 11, 2020 · 4 revisions

The first development card

This was a small, unambitious card. Designed to fit entirely in the expansion card footprint, using a cheap 33MHz 030, with space for 1MB Alt-RAM and with a jumper to enable either the onboard clock or to take an external feed.

Rev1

Space was saved by using extra long pinned sockets to allow me to debug directly on the expansion header pins, but not being sure what I need to route to the CPLD I was constrained by having too few free pins for the bodge wires that were ultimately necessary (insert talk about Bus Arb here).

This board did manage to partially drive the Falcon, getting the diagnostic cartridge to initialise the screen, and I was able to run a few tests, but it'd didn't have enough pins free to respond correctly to new bus requests.

Diagnostic cart booting with errors

The cartridge version of EmuTOS very nearly worked, but showed some strange behaviour. Here, for example reporting a 68033 and Drives A-F being available (A-J, in reality).

Emutos' odd boot screen

At this point I made a custom version of EmuTOS that excluded floppy, sound and blitter and -- crucially -- disabled the PMMU. This would boot, but it would take a lot more time to iron out these issues.

Time for Rev 2.

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