Carte Blanche - the wait is almost over.

[Alex Freed <alex_news@mirrow.com>]

After a number of delays for non-technical reasons it
looks like the "final" production version is alive and well.
We'll start collecting payments very soon now but I already
have one board for sale.
It has a bigger 500E chip populated that is only useful for
development. No extra charge for this one but there is a string
attached: it will go to someone willing to help with the "disk"
driver.

Here is the story. The default configuration does the VGA video
and provides an interface to an MMC/SD card as a mass storage
device. The hardware works quite well but the driver has a lot
of room for improvement:

1. The soft Z80 doesn't understand the SD card's space beyond the
first 32 MB. Why? Because I didn't implement more than 16 bits of
address calculation. Not hard to do.

2. The 6502 ProDOS driver is extremely spartan. In fact read-only
right now. This is one particular thing I'd rather have somebody
else program.

What's needed to load a new configuration into the FPGA is a $12
JTAG adapter by Digilent and a PC with a real parallel port - not
a USB to parallel adapter.

The code goes inside the FPGA into the "BLOCK RAM" so it becomes
a part of the configuration stream. It would be possible to load
this code from a file on the SD card if needed.

If somebody wants to help in return for a faster delivery of a bigger
card, send me e-mail.

-Alex.