Re: Future //

[Liam Busey <buseyl@my-deja.com>]

**** **** wrote:

> 
> Liam,
>     I guess you could look at it that way, if a large order is > anything more than zero chips.

That's odd. Earlier this year I got one of their improved '816 chips
from a group purchase. It was surely less than 50 pieces total. Perhaps
we cleaned them out. 

> Or as far as that goes, they need a few months lead time on email > responses too. Guess I had better fix the firewall so I can make a few > dialpad.com LD calls. No way I am calling arizona on my phone bill, > not when I expect to wait on hold for a half hour or more. 

Unfortunate. IIRC, WDC is a family buisness. It's likely that they only
have a few employees. Since most of their revenue is coming from the
embedded market their web presence is probably a low priority for them.


> Most of the people involved on the a2 ethernet project concur that we > need to build a prototype first, and to that end, I'm prolly gonna 
> grab a junked SNES somewhere, and salvage the 816

Aren't the SNES 65816 chips surface mounted to the board? Removing those
would be delicate work. I wouldn't want to build a prototype using parts
that I couldn't trust. Also, while it's known that the SNES uses a 65816
core I don't think anyone has verified that it's the vanilla chip. The
NES used a custom 6502, the gameboy a custom 8080. I would not be
surprised if Nintendo did something similar with the SNES.

> (Someone would arson my house,and rightly so, if I suggested we 
> salvage the chip from a GS).

Not I. If I were in immediate need of 65816 that's the first place I'd
look. It would be for a good cause. Speaking of which, I have DIP 65816
leftover from my accelerator upgrade. You're welcome to it.

> Don't get me wrong, I have alot of respect for WDC and their chips, 
> but I've already come to accept that if we need their chips, we are 
> going to end up waiting. That's all there is to it.

The downside to using unique chips. :(


Liam Busey