Zorro III memory card... now with Ethernet

[tnt23]

There's been some free space on the PCB anyway



First I have tried CS8900 chip, which was great to start with, but later followed Jason's advice and switched to a DM9000B from Davicom. The registers and EEPROM can be read and written just fine, now I'm the proud owner of a network card with 64M of packet buffers... or a network-enabled RAM card, whichever sounds weirdest.



Tailoring the (non-working) CS8900 driver for the DM9000 will be another saga.

[mfilos]

Just saw that thread.
Always amazed by your work and ideas tnt23! Keep up surprising us

/respect

[tnt23]

Thanks mfilos More pics for the topic.

Checking the LEDs.


Dumping network packets.

[tnt23]

Hey ho!

[NovaCoder]

Cool, love your work

[Reynolds]

When can I buy a few?

[tnt23]

As soon as I assemble another one

[tnt23]

Enter card #2 (lower one). Will go to a local amigan who agrees to suffer the consequences of running freshly brewed drivery on top of hand-soldered hardware.

[DarrenHD]

Are you planning on selling this card? If so I can likely get support added for it so it will work with AmigaOS 4.1 Classic. Can you post the showconfig debug output of it?

Thnx

[turrican3]

incredible stuff !!!!

[cgugl]

seems there is enough space for a fast ide interface !!

[Reynolds]

...and a gfx chip... and a sound chip... and a cpu... and a new motherboard

Seriously, great stuff, like it.
Is it hard to make it for ZorroII? would be a cool thing for A2000s...

[tnt23]

Originally Posted by DarrenHD

Are you planning on selling this card? If so I can likely get support added for it so it will work with AmigaOS 4.1 Classic. Can you post the showconfig debug output of it?

Thnx

Attached is the showconfig output.

Sorry, this particular board has already been reserved. I am going to assemble 2 more boards shortly, PCBs and most of components are on their way. Will be happy to sell them to 'early adopters' for joint testing/bugfixing/development. Luckily there won't be any soldering involved

Also, there is no Zorro II support yet. And a few things beg to be improved in future revisions, if there be any.

Having IDE onboard would be nice for A3000, right now I have to boot using Buddha or Deneb.

For Zorro II, everything has been routed into FPGA, it is a matter of writing some Verilog code and flashing it using cheap USB Blaster dongle (and having A2000 around).

[DarrenHD]

Originally Posted by tnt23

Attached is the showconfig output.

Sorry, this particular board has already been reserved. I am going to assemble 2 more boards shortly, PCBs and most of components are on their way. Will be happy to sell them to 'early adopters' for joint testing/bugfixing/development. Luckily there won't be any soldering involved

Also, there is no Zorro II support yet. And a few things beg to be improved in future revisions, if there be any.

Thanks, I've confirmed with the developers that the card should work under OS 4.1 Classic. It would need to be tested of course

So there is only 64MB of RAM on the board ?

[tnt23]

Originally Posted by DarrenHD

Thanks, I've confirmed with the developers that the card should work under OS 4.1 Classic. It would need to be tested of course

So there is only 64MB of RAM on the board ?

Yes, there's only 64MB available. Sometimes I think of adding another chip, or even three. That requires some routing work. So far I don't see any advantages of having anything more than 64MB in an unexpanded A3000 or A4000. Fitting peripherals on the same board is more fun

I think the RAM part should work under OS 4.1, it's plain Zorro RAM. Ethernet probably is another story. There's a 3.x driver for DM9000 chip, perhaps OS 4.1 would call for a native one. I don't know how different 4.x is from 3.x.

[bubbob42]

Hi Tim,

I'd like to add your card(s) to boards.library - are the product IDs final and do you already have some names for the babies?

Kind regards,

Marcus

[tnt23]

Marcus, you are certainly welcome. The product IDs won't change (23 for Zorro memory board since 2010 I believe, 24 for the dm9k network card since 2013). There's no fancy names yet, the board is labeled 'z3sdram v1.2'.

If I go for another redesign twist, the result could probably be named something like 'Sputnik' or 'Gagarin', waddaya think?

[bubbob42]

I think fancy names are good Amiga tradition.

Do you plan to do hardware mods or just update the sources of the fpga? I'm asking because I'd like to distinguish between prototype boards and later versions. If you want to keep ID 23/24, we could do achieve this through the Autoconfig serial number.

[Reynolds]

"Tetris ZIII"?

[DarrenHD]

Originally Posted by tnt23

Yes, there's only 64MB available. Sometimes I think of adding another chip, or even three. That requires some routing work. So far I don't see any advantages of having anything more than 64MB in an unexpanded A3000 or A4000. Fitting peripherals on the same board is more fun

I think the RAM part should work under OS 4.1, it's plain Zorro RAM. Ethernet probably is another story. There's a 3.x driver for DM9000 chip, perhaps OS 4.1 would call for a native one. I don't know how different 4.x is from 3.x.

As long as it's system conforming, the 3.x driver should work. Several older Zorro ethernet cards (eg. the C= 2065) work fine on OS4.1 classic, with the 68k driver.

Originally Posted by tnt23

Marcus, you are certainly welcome. The product IDs won't change (23 for Zorro memory board since 2010 I believe, 24 for the dm9k network card since 2013). There's no fancy names yet, the board is labeled 'z3sdram v1.2'.

If I go for another redesign twist, the result could probably be named something like 'Sputnik' or 'Gagarin', waddaya think?

I like Sputnik, since I'm a space geek ;-)