Re: 20 MHz 65816

["M. Pender" <mpender@hotmail.com>]

Wayne Stewart <waynes@telus.dotnet> wrote in message
news:kd6Ua.16321$46.3083695@news2.telusplanet.net...
>
> The ZipGS is a caching accelerator as the TransWarpGS is. The major
> difference was that it used a custom chip to replace a lot of the
> individual ones the TransWarpGS used. The story that circulated
> when they stoped production was that another run of this chip was
> $10K+ and there was no market for that many cards. At that time at
> least the cards just were't selling. Someone bought a ZipGS and posted
> that Alltech had said there was only one ZipGS left, it took two months
> to sell.

How many cards are in a production run?  $10K for 100 cards isn't so great,
but $10K for 1000 cards is a bit more attractive.

> There were a couple of II+,IIe accelerators that were almost computers
> on a card, the Titan and even more so the TransWarp(not the
> transWarpGS). The TransWarp doesn;t use the II, II+ or IIe processor
> or motherboard RAM so you can run with those sockets empty.

I've been thinking about the computer-on-a-card approach since I posted that
note about the Zip GSX and TranswarpGS.  At some point it does become less
expensive to incorporate the logic and functions of the motherboard into a
single chip.

It would probably cost less to design a new Apple II-type computer with an
FPGA or ASIC that incorporates the functionality of a 65816-20, two serial
ports, a display driver, an IDE disk driver and an ethernet adapter, than it
would cost to add comparable functionality to the IIgs.

It will be interesting to see how things play out with the new C-one (the
Commodore-64 uber-clone) which uses the same old 65816-14 chips, but
overclocks them to 20 MHz.  IIRC the new motherboard design incorporates
some IBM-compatible features, like PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors.  I
haven't heard anything about USB ports, a hard drive or ethernet capability
though.

- Mike