[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Update on Carte Blanche status.



Steve wrote:
Wow, biffo! And I missed it!

Anyway, I hope everything is all tickety-poo now, and that this little
post dosent cause anymore hoo-har.

But I finished the Apple II in system JTAG programmer - this is purely
a fall back gadget. My only fears are for anyone that loses their FPGA
flash config, and isnt in a position to reflash it. It may take half
your sunday afternoon, but it means you and just your apple can get
back to business by reprogramming the affected card. The SD based
flash programming is the way to go for sure! So quick and easy to
manage hardware libraries. Considering how much fun you can have
knocking up your own hardware designs for cb, being able to assure
people they can reflash their card one way or another is what im
trying to create here.

http://users.tpg.com.au/srkh//a2JTAGprogrammer.JPG

It still needs code from the Apple II side. It uses AN0, 1 and 2 for
write, and PB2 for read. So you can still use your external joystick.

That sounds great, Steve.  It shouldn't be too hard to bit-bang it
at 50kbits/sec or so, assuming that the FPGA doesn't limit the speed.

Alex mentioned configs of about 160K bytes, so that works out to about
1280kbits/50kbits or around 30 seconds of data transfer over JTAG,
plus a few seconds to read the config file from a hard disk--sounds
quite reasonable.  It should be quicker than booting a PC.  ;-)

-michael

NadaNet 3.0 for Apple II parallel computing!
Home page:  http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/

"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it's seriously underused."