Re: Is it legal for hardware?

[david@uow.edu.au (David Wilson)]

Wayne Stewart <waynes@intergate.ca> writes:
>In some cases you'd be guilty of patent infringement. However given the size
>of the Apple II market, I doubt you'd run into any legal problems.
>In some cases like with the ZipGS you'd run into monetary problems. The
>ZipGS uses a custom chip which no one will produce unless you pay for a
>run of several thousand. That's why ZipGS production ended, they couldn't
>hope to sell enough cards to ever pay for making up a batch of chips. I recall
>when someone posted that Altech was down to one last card. I believe it sat
>there for almost 2 months before Nathan Mates bought it. Then once it was
>sold there was a sudden flurry of postings from people saying they had to have
>an accelerator.

When did cards like the Transwarp GS and Zip GS get designed? Early 90's?

Since then we have had a decade of advances in FPGA chips. It should now
(in my opinion) be possible to design an accellerator card using off the
shelf parts. They are certainly fast enough for a 14MHz 65816 (you can
build 33MHz PCI cards using FPGAs).

Does anyone have any better information on this?
--
David Wilson  School of IT & CS, Uni of Wollongong, Australia