Hi! Mike and Douglas have been recently discussing a new idea for an S-100 board. It would be a four port SPI board with space for “mini-boards”. The mini-boards would have a standard SPI interface and allow a variety of SPI chips to be used on small PCB. For instance the ENC28J60 Ethernet adapter, SD cards, various memories, ADCs, DACs, and a variety of other devices.
http://www.mct.net/faq/spi.html
Since John is already fully busy with S-100 8086 CPU board and other projects, I’d like to attempt a new development approach. Since Mike already has a design including a schematic, PCB layout, parts list, etc, we could do a community build and test. Basically this would be we take the existing design, gather up some funds, get some prototype boards, and send them out for initial build and test.
http://8bit.zapto.org/index.php/s100-cards-in-development/nic4-4-port-ethernet-card
Although Mike’s SPI board would make a good starting point, there are a variety of potential S-100 boards in the job queue we could make this way. For instance, Mike has several other S-100 board designs. Also Neil has a neat home brew S-100 serial, parallel, and memory board we could make. Pontus and I have discussed a V9938/V9958 VDP video display board. John and I have discussed a potential S-100 SCSI-1 adapter based on the ZFDC design, a Propeller based S-100 prototyping board, etc. The possibilities are almost endless so if you have an idea for a board this might be the way to get it built.
The initial round of prototype boards will cost $150 for five PCBs from www.33each.com which seems to be a pretty good deal and make top quality prototype boards.
Please post your thoughts, comments, questions, and ideas. Thanks and have a nice day!
Andrew Lynch