On Thu, 13 May 2004, Jochen Kunz wrote:
> On Wed, 12 May 2004 23:30:49 +0100
> Frank Arnold <fm.arnold_at_gmx.net> wrote:
>
> > 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?
You could do a very short (2 inches?) card to save PCB costs
>
> > 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.
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.
>
> > 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/
>
>
Peter Wallace
Mesa Electronics
Received on Thu May 13 2004 - 09:07:10 BST