The spinx512 board for FUZIX

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pser1
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Re: The spinx512 board for FUZIX

Post by pser1 »

Hi,
another great project with Tormod's signature, it is impressive!
This seems to open up a new world of possibilities for our Dragons
even the small Dragon32 can be revamped with that expansion and
FUZIX.
I will keep an eye on this thread to see how the project advances.

@Tormod
please, put me down for one board when you begin production.
Right now my free time tends to zero, so I could not be very
helpful ... but I want to work with that hardware, it seems very
challenging ... maybe we could read VDK files from the card
without the need of drivewire, don't know what speed could we
expect if that were possible.
Keep on making such spectacular stuff!

cheers
pere
sixxie
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Re: The spinx512 board for FUZIX

Post by sixxie »

This does look pretty cool.

How are you booting? Does this map anything on startup at all to get going? Would mean more microcontroller, I guess, but having a boot ROM map itself until RAM is selected would be pretty useful.
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tormod
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Re: The spinx512 board for FUZIX

Post by tormod »

I load the kernel over DriveWire, of course :) It is ideal for such cross-development. I have a soft link in my DW4 folder pointing to the kernel in my build tree, and also AUTOLOAD.DWL points to a FUZIX bootloader dweeb (dwfuz) so when the Dragon powers on it starts FUZIX from my latest build automatically. When things start to stabilize it would be nice to boot from ROM though, especially a rewriteable ROM solution. I am a bit intrigued by the SPI flash option, it would still require a small bootloader to load from it, but a really small and static code while the kernel could be rewritten easily. Loading the kernel from the SD card would require a quite more complex bootloader.
beretta
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Re: The spinx512 board for FUZIX

Post by beretta »

Nice job Tormod! I was wondering how your banking hardware was coming. Its cool that you combined it with the SPI. This should work on a coco too no? This might push me into playing around with the dragon port of Fuzix....
linville
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Re: The spinx512 board for FUZIX

Post by linville »

This looks like a nice pice of hardware, for sure. It might push me over the edge on FUZIX. Let me know how I can get one!
pser1
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Re: The spinx512 board for FUZIX

Post by pser1 »

I like the way this goes.
The more people is interested, the more chances we have that someone develops programs or drivers
to use the full 512k in other operating systems besides FUZIX, say NitrOS-9, OS-9 or simply DDOS with BASIC why not?
A Basic-512k as CoCo3 has would be really nice ...

Let's wait for the first production batch to be announced


cheers
pere
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tormod
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Re: The spinx512 board for FUZIX

Post by tormod »

beretta wrote:This should work on a coco too no? This might push me into playing around with the dragon port of Fuzix....
Pushing the right buttons there, Brett ;) . I'll reserve a board for you!

I see no reason the board won't work out of the box on any Dragon/CoCo compatible with minimum 32K internal RAM. FUZIX will even autodetect the keyboard by snooping at the ROMs.

With the current availability of MPI's (close to zero) I think combining things like the SPI makes sense. Now for those lucky guys with an MPI it should also be possible to to get a usable FUZIX system combining a 64K Dragon/CoCo, my +32K board (hint hint I have more of those left), and a Glenside IDE board or a CoCoSDC. And some software work.
beretta
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Re: The spinx512 board for FUZIX

Post by beretta »

Unfortunately, I have not procured an MPI. I'm hoping the newly designed MPI (Jim @ RetroInnovations ) will be ready sometime soon. A 512k fuzix system would be nice for my CoCo2. I see some expansion SPI headers there too ?

tormod wrote:
beretta wrote:This should work on a coco too no? This might push me into playing around with the dragon port of Fuzix....
Pushing the right buttons there, Brett ;) . I'll reserve a board for you!

I see no reason the board won't work out of the box on any Dragon/CoCo compatible with minimum 32K internal RAM. FUZIX will even autodetect the keyboard by snooping at the ROMs.

With the current availability of MPI's (close to zero) I think combining things like the SPI makes sense. Now for those lucky guys with an MPI it should also be possible to to get a usable FUZIX system combining a 64K Dragon/CoCo, my +32K board (hint hint I have more of those left), and a Glenside IDE board or a CoCoSDC. And some software work.
beretta
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Re: The spinx512 board for FUZIX

Post by beretta »

http://www.mouser.com/Search/m_ProductD ... pVadc0g%3d

There seems to be dozens of these at mousers. What is the chance one of these could be wired to your board?
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tormod
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Re: The spinx512 board for FUZIX

Post by tormod »

The SPI interface can connect 4 slaves as-is. In principle they only need their own slave select line. This SPI interface also has separate MISO inputs, although they can also be shared. One slave select is used for the SD card, the three others go to the 20-pin "SPI" header, along with a full set of pins for the three slaves. It is possible to add a binary decoder to the 3 (or 4) slave select lines to multiplex 7 (or 15) slaves instead.

Any SPI (slave) gadget should work. Note however that some devices with SPI interface also need some extra control lines. For example some typical LCD displays have a command/data flag signal "out of band". So you will have to check their datasheet. The SPI interface has an interrupt input per channel, just in case that could be useful. By reprogramming the CPLD this can be made a GPIO output instead.

I have some 5$-ish ESP8266 wifi modules (they can also be used in the uDW), and they can supposedly act as SPI slaves too. Might be an interesting alternative.

There are also some very affordable SPI ethernet boards around...

BTW, the second header "AUX" is for connecting anything that just needs D0-7, A0-1, R/W, E, Q and P2 (it also has its own CE line but I need to add decoding for it in the CPLD). I was thinking for instance a CRT9128 board.
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