K1208 8mb Fastmem board for the A1200

[plasmab]

Originally Posted by kgc210

Do you have a github for the SPI device drivers and software?

The SD card stuff is in my SPI branch on the tf530 github page. Someone needs to pick it up and finish it off.

[solidcore]

For those who are interested in the project for the a1200, here's a quick preview of the board that kipper has been working on lately.




All the code and board files will be opened up as soon as we have tested thoroughly, no point people playing catch up with us.

[mattymuc]

Very nice
Kipper2ks first version is running fine here.

[alenppc]

Whatever happened to the PCI form factor?

[FREEMILK]

The board will be sold in both variants,
the 1200 connector as well and the PCI edge converted version with adapter.

The PCI version is nice for anyone who wants to take this further, it allows you to go prototyping at a very low cost.

[PR77]

How many layers is the PCB? Seems to be 4 from the look of the non-tracked via's.

[plasmab]

Where are the sources? If they’re being sold you need to open them up

[kipper2k]

Originally Posted by plasmab

Where are the sources? If they’re being sold you need to open them up

this board is not being sold, the only one that is opened up is the one that you already have sources for, (the basic 8mb board with the ide not working).

As solidcore already stated when displaying the renderings we will open it up once we have sorted it out before blanks/kits/etc are offered for sale

(The board is indeed a 4 layer board with a bigger cpld than previous)

[plasmab]

No problems. Thought it was already on sale from the responses.

[kipper2k]

Originally Posted by plasmab

No problems. Thought it was already on sale from the responses.

Matty has the first version, there were 5 out in the wild.
This board will have 4 out for testers and hopi ng very soon to have SD and SPI Internet sorted

[solidcore]

Yeah Ive only donated initially to kipper for parts and postage fees . It will be open source on GitHub but far from complete so nothing to release yet. New board has a bigger cpld and spi being designed from ground up. With possible features such as sd boot as well. China board house delays and everyone involved can only put a percentage of their time on this. Look forward to the new revision.

Edit: Today we decided to start a new clean VHDL project moving away from Verilog. Kipper and myself have began working with another individual who has a high level of cpld and fpga experience, we'd also like to thank matze for his experience and input into this project as far. Regardless, the project will remain open source, a github will open in the coming weeks. A 060 board is on the agenda as well, which we're excited about.

Hmmm playing with cpld's is a lot of fun so we're going to experiment :
sd / spi flash memory rom bootloading ,
akiko,
and some other playful things.

Updates will be posted as usual.

[PR77]

Originally Posted by solidcore

Hmmm playing with cpld's is a lot of fun so we're going to experiment :
sd / spi flash memory rom bootloading ,

This would be an absolute blast! I've been thinking about how to do this with my 68000 design and have a couple of ideas already. On my Rev 2 PCB I'm considering adding a footprint for "something" for this purpose.

My idea is to use the "DiagArea" as part of an attached to an I/O device (virtual in your CPLD) linked in by the expansion.library. With this, you can have a small -4, -8 or -16 bit ROM which bootstraps (with existing KS ROM) reading from the SD card an "Image.bin" to FastRam (preserved during reset) and then resets the Amiga again to boot the KS from FastRAM. I actually think this is how the Blizzard Turbo Cards actually do it (can someone confirm this???).

Sooooooo many ideas! Do you think working on Amiga hardware can be a full time job?

[solidcore]

Originally Posted by PR77

This would be an absolute blast! I've been thinking about how to do this with my 68000 design and have a couple of ideas already. On my Rev 2 PCB I'm considering adding a footprint for "something" for this purpose.

My idea is to use the "DiagArea" as part of an attached to an I/O device (virtual in your CPLD) linked in by the expansion.library. With this, you can have a small -4, -8 or -16 bit ROM which bootstraps (with existing KS ROM) reading from the SD card an "Image.bin" to FastRam (preserved during reset) and then resets the Amiga again to boot the KS from FastRAM. I actually think this is how the Blizzard Turbo Cards actually do it (can someone confirm this???).

Sooooooo many ideas! Do you think working on Amiga hardware can be a full time job?

Fun and yeah well I spend as much time as I can fit between work, family, etc. You have to have 3 hands when soldering, and 2 bodies when working on amigas and life commitments. ha

[t3v6]

Originally Posted by AwoLStill

Now THAT is what I like to see

P.S. Once the SPI Ethernet works, I have no more need of PCMCIA, so a jumper for 4MB / 8MB would do me, I'd probably never use it.

Basically that was my idea: Have the 8MB but not loose PCMCIA networking
or
CF Adapters.

Now with enough memory, I don´t care about the CF adapter, because LAN would give me even nicer copy-possibilities than CF

Still, the CF card makes it easier than configuring Amiga LAN...but I´ll figure that out...

[solidcore]

Completely new: VHDL firmware, SPI and SD.Device

We're now moving onto 'other features'

[plasmab]

Originally Posted by solidcore

Completely new: VHDL firmware, SPI and SD.Device

We're now moving onto 'other features'

VHDL... evil.. burn it

Open the sd.device please.

[mattymuc]

Awesome news :-)

[cheshirenoir]

Any updates on this one? It's been super exciting to read about do far.

[plasmab]

The solidcore post was dated 1/4 ... April fool?

[solidcore]

Originally Posted by plasmab

The solidcore post was dated 1/4 ... April fool?

Not at all. It's very real, see images below. We've all been busy so not much news I'm afraid.

Regarding the release of the driver, it will be published soon, I'll update the thread when that happens. However, the driver is unfinished and still requires a non-blocking message queue, support for SCSI, and hot-swap disk change.

Performance is around 187,000 BYTES/Second (based on sysinfo speed test) and this is with a SPI clock of 14mhz (amiga clock OR pal clock/2). The type of card SD, SDHC, SDXC doesn't change the performance speed at 14mhz/512 Block Size, however, options for block sizes are 1 through to 16384 but I've not had time to test this and it was agreed for the time being for compatibility reasons that we leave it set at 512.

Finally, I believe it'd be nice if we got an alternative to fat95 which doesn't try to walk the fat on FAT32, as it has considerable mount delay as opposed to FAT formatted SD cards.

*Teaser* We're now sniffing ETH packets but yet to tie it into a stack to really have a play. soon