Another Deneb production run?

[mboehmer_e3b]

im not sure if its neccessary but wouldnt you think it would be good to upload whats available and open of the documentation to aminet if only for safekeeping. in the end there was cases of documentation lost, that might be helpful at some point though.

You don't seem to trust by backup system :-(

Michael

[spirantho]

I never trust any backup system...... especially on important data.

[LoadWB]

I never trust any backup system...... especially on important data.

Blasphemy!  "The Cloud" is absolute perfection!!  Just ask anyone who had or has a SideKick, or anyone who used MobileMe.

Oh, wait.

/sarcasm  :afro:

[spirantho]

It's true! I forgot The Cloud!

The Cloud solves all our problems. It even lets you magically edit photos seamlessly. Must be true because that nice Microsoft lady on the telly said so.

The cloud is the answer, ask any of the big IT corporations these days. Shame none of them seem to listen to what the question is....

[mboehmer_e3b]

I never trust any backup system...... especially on important data.

I stored it on an iPhone, so I guess there's at least one backup at Apple... :-)

Michael

[Jose]

@mboehmer_e3b

Any chance the DaVinci or something similar will make the light of day ?

[freqmax]

The Cloud is perfect when you want to invite state-, corporate-, crime and other spies into your data. Tracking and manipulation of your data etc.. Access dependent on your wallet and the employee turnover etc.

Someone that may need this data may come around when the original producer is no longer around.

[Tension]

I have - up to date - not received any request on documentation of DENEB for driver development. The documentation exists (well, it could be in a nicer form, and more detailed on some points, but ASCII never dies ;-) ) and will be made available to anyone who's interested in doing some driver work.

Datasheet of the ISP1760 (former Philips, then NXP, now Sony-Ericsson, tomorrow... good question) is available on the web, and for doing driver development you don't need to do any FPGA reverse engineering (which is, by the way, possible, but definitely not a real fun).

The FPGA "program" for DENEB (which is three programs, to be correct, one for Zorro III, one for Zorro II and Fast-Zorro II, and one for rescue mode) is quite complex. Especially the Zorro III image contains quite a few goodies which take care of certain Buster bugs, and just "writing a new FPGA image" will almost sure take some time until you have reached some stable operation, at least with one type of CPU cards.

Moreover, Zorro III is asynchronous by nature, and FPGAs are naturally synchronous devices, and I can only tell from own experience that Dave Haynie's notes on synchronization are worth reading... that's why the DENEB bus interface is running at 100MHz internally to get stable conditions on the bus.

Which reminds me - there was one attempt to design a Zorro III RAM card from some users while I was doing the ZorRAM design work. I have never seen any working card from that project, which was (if I remember correctly) using an FPGA as bus interface. Last things I heard there was "fast, but unstable operation"... typical symptoms of sync problems.

In total, it is about 500kB VHDL source code for Zorro III PIO and DMA operation.
And this code is not included in the documentation, for the same reasons why you can't get the source code of Poseidon hardware drivers - there's quite a lot of work and experience within ("closed" in your words).



I think the problem here is somewhat more complex (and agree on that this is not the issue of that thread, but thinking of solutions to cope with the situation).
BTW, the documentation for driver development never was "closed" for any of the E3B products - at least if the chip documentation was not NDA'ed like the SUBWAY/HIGHWAY controllers at the beginning (it was released after some time, before we were simply not allowed to disclose it to third parties).

Michael

That was amazing!

[TheBilgeRat]

Just why do you think there won't be anything new on the horizon?

Not to be cranky, but why would anyone bother with R&D on some new widget when its infinitely cheaper to re-run a proven design?  We'd all love to see some uber-awesome graphics/usb/net/sound all in one card with perhaps an 060 glued to its bottom, but the likelihood of that seems very slim, even with a wizard such as yourself designing cool stuff.

There needs to be a new model on how to build stuff for the retro community where the companies realize this isn't some ticket to the gravy train of profitability or the resurrection of "teh truu amieega", just some folks making awesome stuff for a dinosaur of a computer one order at a time.

[Bamiga2002]

A fresh production run of timing-fixed A1200 motherboards would be cool too.

[freqmax]

timing-fixed A1200

What problem are you refering to ?