Terrible Fire Accelerators

[jediknight]

thats great 25mhz already your doing a great job its going to be a great piece of hardware that will bring some life in too the old dog lol cant wait for more updates.

[plasmab]

Originally Posted by jediknight

thats great 25mhz already your doing a great job its going to be a great piece of hardware that will bring some life in too the old dog lol cant wait for more updates.

I have a cold and i'm getting settled into a new job so it may be a week or so. (i hope not longer anyways)

[Pat the Cat]

Originally Posted by plasmab

I've never seen a PCB manufacturer do anything but copper for tracks.. they do all sorts of different weights of copper at different prices. I've seen (and worked with) Aluminium substrate boards but they've always been copper for the tracks... and different weights of copper make more than 20p per board difference (at 10cm x 10cm).

Happy to be wrong... Just never seen it in 20 years of doing this.

EDIT: I'm also pretty sure copper has the best undercut performance too.

OK, but there are ways, just not done by UK manufacturers. They're too cheap and too cut throat, but that's the UK for you.

I was lucky learning about this, one of my first jobs was in a lab with prototype boards. Often they'd come in properly screwed, tracks hanging off, even holes missing sometimes. Guess who got to fix the tracks?

You can avoid a lot of this stuff if you don't use etch tanks, but a lot of that stuff is proprietary so I won't talk about it. Some is alledgedly open source, and basiclly involves ways of laying very carefully controlled silver traces down. But you don't have to use exotic materials even, really. You just have to add stages to the process, and the manufacturers won't do that. Not without charging.

You can just accept the kerf (gap or void) will be there when it comes out the tank and add another process to fix it, that's what they do.

Back in the day, I just used to re-tin the boards very carefully, at an angle. The Kerf soaks up the solder - track is good. And it was economical, because I was on the Youth Exploitation Scheme at the time. The downside, of course, was any damage I caused had to be accepted by the employer. Short of deliberately burning the place down, they were quids in.

I guess a different technique is to lay paste around the tracks, then heat them up with a heatgun. Again, the kerf should soak up the excess. Never tried it, but the theory is good (I certainly would have tried it back in the day, but SMD hadn't been invented in 1984, which is when I officially started getting paid - a little bit anyway - for using a soldering iron. I started soldering when I was 3. Got the scars to prove it.)

PCB Manufacturers would not bother, instead they just use automation to make things at an inferior resolution. If they haven't got a robot to do the job, "it can't be done". That is the UK electronics industry for you, and I agree with you there, BUT... The UK is not the whole of the world.

[whiteb]

Originally Posted by Pat the Cat

Was that Open Source or what? It doesn't matter really, THIS is open source, so while comments are fine, what matters is people doing things with it so that real viable solutions emerge.

Criticism is not over harsh when it suggests alternatives, but implementing alternatives isn't the sole responsibility of the github originator. That's open source for you.

You want it, you help make it.

Dennis did make it open source, sure he did not use Github, but he publicly made the Board gerbers and FPGA source public.

[Pat the Cat]

OK, but that is a seperate issue. I'm not going to comment on Minimig. I don't think I have anything useful to add to that, but I do note comments that the guy behind it did take an awful lot of flak.

Taking flak is not unusual when trying new things.

[Locutus]

It took a while for the initial code dump to be published but that was it, keep in mind that Github wasn't a thing when Minimig came out (*10* years ago)

I met Dennis a couple of times at meetings at that time and when asking about stuff i was shown whatever i wanted, great guy, fun discussions (i was doing FPGA development at that time myself) i don't see the fuss :-)

[keith]

Hi don't know if might help with ide, if your still having fun and games.
http://www.mkl211015.altervista.org/ide/a500ide.html

[plasmab]

Originally Posted by Pat the Cat

OK, but there are ways, just not done by UK manufacturers. They're too cheap and too cut throat, but that's the UK for you.

I was lucky learning about this, one of my first jobs was in a lab with prototype boards. Often they'd come in properly screwed, tracks hanging off, even holes missing sometimes. Guess who got to fix the tracks?

You can avoid a lot of this stuff if you don't use etch tanks, but a lot of that stuff is proprietary so I won't talk about it. Some is alledgedly open source, and basiclly involves ways of laying very carefully controlled silver traces down. But you don't have to use exotic materials even, really. You just have to add stages to the process, and the manufacturers won't do that. Not without charging.

You can just accept the kerf (gap or void) will be there when it comes out the tank and add another process to fix it, that's what they do.

Back in the day, I just used to re-tin the boards very carefully, at an angle. The Kerf soaks up the solder - track is good. And it was economical, because I was on the Youth Exploitation Scheme at the time. The downside, of course, was any damage I caused had to be accepted by the employer. Short of deliberately burning the place down, they were quids in.

I guess a different technique is to lay paste around the tracks, then heat them up with a heatgun. Again, the kerf should soak up the excess. Never tried it, but the theory is good (I certainly would have tried it back in the day, but SMD hadn't been invented in 1984, which is when I officially started getting paid - a little bit anyway - for using a soldering iron. I started soldering when I was 3. Got the scars to prove it.)

PCB Manufacturers would not bother, instead they just use automation to make things at an inferior resolution. If they haven't got a robot to do the job, "it can't be done". That is the UK electronics industry for you, and I agree with you there, BUT... The UK is not the whole of the world.

I didnt say it couldnt be done I say i wasnt going to do it and that i thought it wasnt worth doing. Frankly you sound like someone who can never be wrong no matter what. So please go away. I dont want to deal with people like you in my leisure time.

If you were half as smart as you are trying to make out you'd have made this board years ago and I would be doing something for a different machine.

[keith]

Hi I know you're busy so sorry for my random post I don't know if I am any help or just crazy.. would something like this be any help, programmable crystal oscillator, sorry if this of no help. Ps like the new video as the progress is amazing!

[plasmab]

Originally Posted by keith

Hi I know you're busy so sorry for my random post I don't know if I am any help or just crazy.. would something like this be any help, programmable crystal oscillator, sorry if this of no help. Ps like the new video as the progress is amazing!

A programmable oscillator would be interesting later on. It would need to be able to boot up at 16Mhz reliably and then not crash when it switched to a new frequency. I guess you'd want to put a library to control this in a flash rom too.. so much more complexity... nice once everything is stable.

Really what i want is a SD/MMC card driver. One that will work if i do the byte swap in hardware and basically map the SD/MMC card to an 8 bit port..

[Pat the Cat]

Originally Posted by plasmab

I didnt say it couldnt be done I say i wasnt going to do it and that i thought it wasnt worth doing.

OK, and I fully understand that. Most circuits on Github things like that just do not apply - they're not designed to be as compact a possible, for this sort of issue.

I'm not a schematic designer TerribleFire. I can take a design and rempap it, even get it built with exotic technology. That's not the same thing as designing a circuit and solution that are reliable in the first place.

So long as the circuit is good, the firmware is solid, this can be done AND I don't expect anybody else to reroute anything but me. Same goes for board manufacture. That's my problem to resolve, if I want it different, I do the work.

I've only been back in Amigaland for a fortnight after maybe a 20 year break. I'm changing my sig to reflect my goals.

[Locutus]

Originally Posted by plasmab

Really what i want is a SD/MMC card driver. One that will work if i do the byte swap in hardware and basically map the SD/MMC card to an 8 bit port..

Take a look at the code of the Vampire's sdcard.device driver, the hardware is really simple, would be a useful peeking spot.

https://github.com/ezrec/saga-driver.../sagasd.device

[HelloBeautiful]

Slightly off topic but does the CD32 expansion pinout have everything needed to plug a simple CPU card like this in? The Elsat Promodule and the Paravision SX-1 expansions add memory to the system and have an additional expansion slot for the FMV module so I was thinking that maybe it would be easy to have a simple pcb with a cpu made for these that could utilize the memory already in place. I guess timing might be an issue?

[Pat the Cat]

SX64 was an 030 and memory for a CD32 so the expansion connector can definitely take one.

Tended to run a bit hot in the summer though. Was very nice Amiga though - very small, pretty fast, with AGA. And Akiko, but I must admit, I never tried real CD32 titles in the short time I had one for review. I didn't have any.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Pat the Cat

SX64 was an 030 and memory for a CD32 so the expansion connector can definitely take one.

You mean SX-32

[Pat the Cat]

Correct, yes I do mean SX32, the SX64 was a Commodore 64. Thank you.

In the UK, Analogic still have some bits and bobs of CD32 kit left.

[HelloBeautiful]

Thanks, I'm familiar with the SX32Pro, but I meant that with the CD32 connector having less lines than say an A1200 one, could you hook up a TerribleFire board without the need to recreate some signals.

As said, the SX-1 and ProModule offer an additional CD32 connector so you can just hook a PCB in without any more connectors so I was wondering if it would be easy (and cheap) to upgrade these with a small TB board that would only feature the processor as these already feature IDE and Fast memory. Memory access would be slower than integrated with the CPU but perhaps it would be trivial to do. Just a thought, like.

[E-Penguin]

Out of interest, are you creating the M68k cores yourself, or building a board around open source cores? I quite fancy getting into FPGAs and wonder where to start.

[plasmab]

Originally Posted by E-Penguin

Out of interest, are you creating the M68k cores yourself, or building a board around open source cores? I quite fancy getting into FPGAs and wonder where to start.

I'm not doing FPGAs for the TF series accelerators. I have done FPGA cores before but i'm more interested in making hardware based on original components.

[E-Penguin]

Ah, misunderstood then, I thought you were doing a sort of Vampire style recreation. There's some kind of programmable logic though (CPLDs?) presumably?

We live in exciting times, when such technology is available for amateurs to make real hardware. I'll continue following this with interest