Re: Carte Blanche

[srkh28@gmail.com]

Hi Michael,

I thought you were discussing the development cycle. Sorry. But to
reprogram carte blanche in say a closed running system is also
possible - not totally on the fly though, a restart (power off/on) is
required.
If your happy to write the software that would be great. The steps for
doing this are;

1. Choose a carte blanche image of choice from some sort of menu
system from the running host
2. Contact Carte Blanche thru registers and download new image to card
(where the registers could be located with existing card designs - ie
4MB memory board, is not resolved as yet)
3. Carte Blanche will take the new bit stream image from the apple II
host and reprogram its SPI boot flash and respond back saying its
complete
4. Restart (power cycle) your system and carte blanche will boot as
the new card

Of course, its possible to write a bad image to carte blanche that
would send the board off into la-la land, meaning you would have to
pop the top on your apple, plug up JTAG, and restore a known good
image that way.


Steve


On Apr 3, 9:38 am, "Michael J. Mahon" <mjma...@aol.com> wrote:
> Alex Freed wrote:
> > Michael J. Mahon wrote:
>
> >> Steve, it wasn't immediately apparent whether it was possible to
> >> re-program the board while it is installed by running Apple II software.
>
> >> This would enable it to be a real "chameleon card", since configurations
> >> could be loaded into the card in a few seconds to alter its personality.
>
> > This ideas has been discussed on this forum but proved to be a huge
> > task. More on the software side than the hardware side. Porting the
> > JTAG programming tool to an 8 bit CPU with rather limited resources
> > is far from trivial. And if you absolutely have to have it, you
> > probably can. It's not too hard to make a Wiggler-style interface
> > between an Apple parallel card and the JTAG port on Carte Blanche. Just
> > write the software :)
>
> I'd be glad to write the software if it comes to that.
>
> But I'd rather access the card through its bus connection than by
> using another (parallel) card.  Since an Apple parallel card is
> little more than an 8-bit latch, that doesn't seem difficult.
>
> I presume that the data formats and protocols for JTAG programming
> are straightforward...  I'd expect what is essentially a "copy file
> to port" operation, with some handshaking, initialization, and cleanup.
>
> -michael
>
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