Wicher 500 - new turbo card for A500

[waldiamiga]

Originally Posted by spidi

Names are inspired by old Polish airplanes

Next project - PZL.23 Karaś

[zipper]

On my first visit to Poland I just learned naprawa samochodów - and found out a garage where Sobiesław Zasada's Porsche was lying to be fixed.

[Retrofan]

Originally Posted by spidi

I like the way you got the connector. Could that method be also applicable to the A1200 ?

[idrougge]

I think that's already been done for prototypes, but it's not a good idea for serial runs.

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by Retrofan

I like the way you got the connector. Could that method be also applicable to the A1200 ?

It's already employed by Elbox for their Mediator board connectors, although it's nearly impossible to see the join because they're not glued and are precision cut.

[spidi]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

It's already employed by Elbox for their Mediator board connectors, although it's nearly impossible to see the join because they're not glued and are precision cut.

Edge connector is glued only to the prototype.

[spidi]

Originally Posted by Schoenfeld

Spidi,

your sync design gets every single cycle, that's excellent. From what I can see on the pictures, you should have the possibility to add a MapROM function, this will give you quite some extra speed on Sysinfo stones and IDE performance (unless you run a patched scsi.device that's already in fastmem - then you already have the best speed).

At this point, the ACA500plus (which is async, so loses a cycle here and there) beats your sync design just because of MapROM at 14MHz. You can beat the ACA500plus at 14MHz if you implement MapROM. However, you won't reach the ACA500plus speed if it's clocked at 21MHz or more :-)

Jens

Thanks for the advice.

[spidi]

Originally Posted by spidi

[ Show youtube player ] you can see the presentation of the prototype Wicher 500 turbo card for the Amiga 500.

CPU: 68000/68010 - 14MHz
FAST Memory: 1/2/4/8 MB EDO SIMM
IDE Controller (Kickstart 2.05+)

I added SPI Controller support and RTC DS1306.
[ Show youtube player ]

[Schoenfeld]

The right path! You now have two possibilities of making it compatible with standard software, such as setclock and iprefs: You either patch the resource, or you let all accesses to the RTC area run through a microcontroller that translates the register contents into OKI6242-compatible registers. The latter solutoin will most likely also show "clock found" under Sysinfo (to my knowledge, Sysinfo bangs the hardware - can anyone confirm this?).

Jens

[jbenam]

Gotta love how Jens is helping spidi with his design - that's the spirit the Amiga community needs.

Great product there spidi, congrats!

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by jbenam

Gotta love how Jens is helping spidi with his design - that's the spirit the Amiga community needs.

Exactly right. A lot of people could learn from this.

[gulliver]

This action speaks highly of Jens Schoenfeld.

[eXeler0]

@spidi considering all you learned by doing this project could you give me an educated guess about the amount of work to do a Wicher CD32 edition ;-)
Ignore the accelerator part.. Just RAM slot + IDE ;-)

Skickat från min LG-H850 via Tapatalk

[chiark]

There's times when the Amiga community depresses me, and there's times when I think, "this is freaking awesome".

new hardware design that works? Freaking awesome.
Experienced developer sharing advice and best practice? Freaking awesome.

Great work, wonderful to see this happening.

[Yulquen74]

Cool project!

The funny thing about the CPU (MC68HC000) is that it can be heavily overclocked,
so if the author changes to an async design, it can be pushed to 50 MHz or more
while barely getting warm (I run mine at 66 MHz with 1 SRAM waitstate).

[Exit]

Spidi, its great to see more hardware designers with passion for the amiga.. excellent stuff already

[spidi]

Current specifications turbo card Wicher 500.

CPU: 68000/68010 - 12,14,16,18,21,24,28 MHz,
FAST Memory: 1/2/4/8 MB EDO SIMM,
IDE Controller (Kickstart 2.05+),
SPI Controller,
RTC on SPI bus

and some pics.

[utri007]

Any news about Wicherek? At least this would fit inside of CDTV.



http://retro.7-bit.pl/?lang=en&go=pr...wicherek14plcc

[TjLaZer]

Very nice!

[spidi]

Originally Posted by spidi

Current specifications turbo card Wicher 500.

CPU: 68000/68010 - 12,14,16,18,21,24,28 MHz,
FAST Memory: 1/2/4/8 MB EDO SIMM,
IDE Controller (Kickstart 2.05+),
SPI Controller,
RTC on SPI bus

Small update.
Current max. speed is 48MHz