Hi folks,
I haven't logged in for a while, and did not really follow the end of the discussion about the 68000-adapter that would give a clockport. I did eMail Ian Stedman about the schematics that he has published, telling him that what he has drawn there would never work properly because he is not using any of the strobe signals, but he never got back to me. He probably took the advice that I gave in the amiga-news.de thread: Buy a 68000 book and read it. Eiher this, or an extended why-does-my-prototype-odd-things-debugging-session is keeping him busy.
Then some people on amiga-news.de were talking about giving Ian money to produce the things, which made me worry a bit, because even more Amiga people might lose their money in something that will not work.
One saturday that I initially planned for tinkering on my car, the weather was too bad to work outside, so I had some spare time. I made a new design with clean strobe usage, two clockports, and had the "kit form" idea in the back of my head, so no programmable parts, and no SMD.
The result was a PCB that I hand-assembled, and sent to one of the amiga-news.de readers (Lemmink), who has tested the thing (I don't have a suped-up A500, and no accelerators for the 500). We found one design fault (addressing fault) and one mechanical thing, but the design worked fairly well. I did some changes, then added the PCB to a panel that went into production a few days later.
I'm a bit ashame to say that it's more than twice as expensive than the A600 clockport adapter, but I have a good justification: There are much more parts, the PCB is bigger, and you get two clockports.
I have made a really small production run, and some of them are still left. If you're interested, eMail me, or contact me through the form on my webpage
www.ami.ga .
The price of the A500 dual-clockport adapter is 22,- EUR. It's not available in kit form, but only as a finished and tested product. It works with the Silversurfer, CPU cards, Subway, Delfina, Vario, and most probably also with more clockport stuff, because the generated timing is pretty much identical with the timing I'm generating on my Zorro cards.
A600 clockport adapters are also still available, the price is 9,90 EUR.
If there is enough interest, I can make any quantity of these adapters. Although it does not make any sense, it also works in the A2000, but I haven't tested it in the CDTV yet. The digital side should work fine, but I can't say anything about the mechanical side.
Jens Schoenfeld
