Today I Received...

[bwinkel67]

I was surprised how small the PiStorm board was...

[Pr0f]

Are those buffer chips on the board to the left hand side? Does it mean this board has 5v tolerant I/O ?

[Pr0f]

Are those buffer chips on the board to the left hand side? Does it mean this board has 5v tolerant I/O ?

I should have googled earlier - so it's a 68000 replacement effectively ! Designed primarily for Amiga - but as the doc says - should work in any 16bit 68K based device...

[Derek_Stewart]

Hi,

There little movement to make the Pistorm rum on the Atar ST, which has the same CPU as the Amiga A500.

There is another Pi accelerator called the Phantom-X for the X68000, which a link to the Atari Forum details this:
https://www.exxoshost.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5257

There is a link to the project page, but it is Japanese, Google Chrome translates to be:

PhantomX.zip

Phantom-X X68000 Pi Accelerator Project Translation

(6.31 MiB) Downloaded 197 times

[Dave]

Today I received six 68060RC50 and 216 2Mx8 SRAM.

[Derek_Stewart]

Today I received six 68060RC50 and 216 2Mx8 SRAM.

Where did you buy the 68060RC50?

This was a similiar processor in the Q60, which was a 68RC060RC50 over clocked to 60Mhz or 66Mhz

[Dave]

These are EC parts. I got them from a regular local supplier who knew of my 68K proclivities and found these on a shelf. I do get lucky with Motorola/Freescale chips by nature of living in Austin.

It is also quite easy to bump into people who worked at the company during that time. When I was a member of the local for-profit makerspace "TechShop" before it went out of business, there was a member name of Brian, a man in his late 60s or early 70s who was so very happy to see me in the electronics lab assembling a board using a 68020. He was in charge of the 68030 team and told me stories of those times.

The main one I remember was that the 68030 team was tasked with making the 68020. They were very thorough and did it right. This took too long for management, who were feeling the heat from Intel and the new kid, AMD. They put together another team to take resources from the first 020 project and the 010, and to make an alternative as a back-up plan. That team was ready with a product that was slightly smaller and less capable, but met the spec documents very closely.

The second team's part was released as the 020, and the first team's 020 was released as the 030. There wasn't originally even going to be an 030, because their road map had them jumping to 040, 060, 080. The absence of the 080 is because they saw the blowing winds of ARM and knew they needed to go back to fundamentals and re-architect the core again to be competitive. That arrived as Coldfire, which they internally called CPU32.

But yes, I have more 68K parts than anyone I am aware of (over 1000) but heavily concentrated towards the 68SEC000, 68EC020, 68EC030. I also have a fair collection of Z180 and Zilog support ICs, and a modest collection of 486DX2 parts. I like the 486DX2 hardware because, all though I do not like Intel's architecture to USE, I find the bus very similar to the 68020/030 - not pin compatible but easy to adapt. Even the dynamic bus sizing is compatible with only the very simplest of logic.

Finally, I have collected literally thousands of SRAMs. Some large, some small. I have 66,000 8Kx8, 8,000 32Kx8, 1,000 512Kx8, several hundred 2Mx8/1Mx16 and several hundred 8Mx8/4Mx16.

[ones' complement]

Finally, I have collected literally thousands of SRAMs. Some large, some small. I have 66,000 8Kx8, 8,000 32Kx8, 1,000 512Kx8, several hundred 2Mx8/1Mx16 and several hundred 8Mx8/4Mx16.

Quite a cache

[Dave]

I am sat here waiting impatiently for today's delivery. I'll post pics when it comes. LOTS of components.

[NormanDunbar]

Today I received a notification that my book, Arduino Software Internals, has been cited in 2 journals and 4 books!

https://citations.springernature.com/bo ... 842-5790-6 if anyone is interested!

Cheers,
Norm.