It's nearly 12 years since a group of hardcore amigans lead to a little commotion in the Amiga market, releasing to the world their own creation - Prometheus PCI card
It was a great challenge for each one of us, perhaps on the verge of madness. Yet, we strongly believed in what we were doing and gave it our best. For various reasons our plans didn't come up as expected, but this is how the life goes. We have no doubt, that it was a very valuable experience for us (at least for those sincerely signed below).
Once again, we would like to stirr things up a little bit. We have decided to give you, the world, a complete documentation, plans, firmware and all the files necessary to create your own Zorro3 PCI bridge. You can freely modify, copy or use them for a basis of your own construction and even build an exact copy of Prometheus. There is just one rule. It has to be free. Whatever you create, either by using our work as a whole or just a part of it, must be free.
Check it out:
http://krashan.ppa.pl/articles/prometheus/Sounds like fun? We hope so, because we have more suprises. But next one will come from the good guys of E3b.
Best regards,
Filip Dąb-Mirowski
Grzegorz Kraszewski
Work on Prometheus hardware didn`t stop. For a new Prometheus based hardware, DaVinci, the whole CPLD design was revised and written from scratch by E3B. To track down the DMA issue quite some investigations were made, and after identifying the root of problem the Prometheus CPLD design was equipped with a new PCI arbiter, including features like round robbin
fair arbitration, high priority Zorro access, enhanced PCI config mechanisms with support for PCI bridges and some other enhancements which may be discussed later on.
Unfortunately the DaVinci project was stopped after fully working prototype card was running. The software part was rewritten and is being maintained by Tobias Seiler, who contributes the software also as gift for the community. The library supports both old and new firmware Prometheus transparently.
The compiled binaries are being made public for free, so you can simply upgrade your own Prometheus - use it, as you like, as long as no profit is being made from it. We provide some small manual on how you can flash the CPLDs of your Prometheus card, and on request assist you on specific questions. If you feel like giving us some feedback, dont hesitate to contact us - I`m sure we will find some small gift ideas
Please understand that the source codes of the new CPLD design are notbeing disclosed. There's load of work involved, and quite some experience which we dont feel to give away for free.
So please enjoy your new Prometheus CPLD upgrade - hope you like it as
much we enjoyed the development work!
Web page link will be
http://www.e3b.de/prometheus/Michael Boehmer
