OK, after some minor glitches I’m now ready to send off a batch order for our S100 bus Master/Slave 80386 CPU board and its two daughter RAM boards 8MB and 32/64MB. These will be a “commercial quality” boards with gold fingers (and in the case of the 80386 board) slightly thicker board traces. This board set represents a few hundred hours of debugging and prototypes. In fact the CPU board is the 5th prototype board Andrew & I did. It runs on the S100 bus at 9MHz (0 -16MB addressing range) and with the daughter boards (8, 32 or 64MB) at 36MHz in pipeline mode, no wait states. Much of the time in the past was spend getting a good ROM based monitor working that can switch the CPU in and out of Protected mode and thus allowing the 4GB addressing range capability etc. The board boots up fine (in real mode) with MSDOS V4.01. All this is described here:-
http://s100computers.com/My%
20System%20Pages/80386% 20Board/80386%20CPU%20Board. htm http://s100computers.com/
Software%20Folder/80386% 20Monitor/80386%20Monitor.htm
These boards are fairly sophisticated, I do not recommend them for S100 bus beginners, however in all lightly-hood, it will be quite some time until another batch order is done, so if you think you are/will be up to utilizing them now or in the future, let me know and I will add your name to the batch order (see below). So far everybody is ordering all 3 boards. The 80386 CPU board will work on its own with our other RAM boards and in particular with the recent 16MB Static RAM board. See:-
http://s100computers.com/My%
20System%20Pages/16M%20RAM% 20Board/16MG%20RAM%20Board.htm With the few other RAM S100 RAM boards (Godbout etc.) I have it seems to be fine also.
The 8MB daughter board is a simpler RAM board but expensive to stock with RAM. The 32 or 64 MB Board requires our V06c “mezzanine boards”. These were used for the above 16MB Static RAM board. The 4MBX8 static RAM chips have only recently become available. I have not actually tested them yet on this board. The 2MBX8 chips (3.3 & 5V types), run fine. In the 80386 monitor I wrote an extensive RAM testing program to check them out. It checks out bytes, words and dword read/writes to each byte or RAM checking that all other RAM locations are not overwritten (bad addressing lines). Takes a few hours to run BTW.
So far I have the following listing of people that wanted boards:-
Brian Marstella in 1 of the 80386 boards as well as 1 each of the 8 MB and 32 MB boards + mezzanines.
Matt Turner 2 of 80386, 2 of 8Mb Ram, 2 of 32Mb Ram & req'd mezzanines
Paul Birkel, 1 of the 80386 boards as well as 1 each of the 8 MB and 32 MB boards + mezzanines.David Fry, 1 of the 80386 boards as well as 1 each of the 8 MB and 32 MB boards + mezzanines.
If you want to be added to the list please let me know ASAP. I have not figured out total costs yet, but it’s going to be the same as for past boards. Will have them done bt PCBCart.
I’m not quite sure what to do about the mezzanine boards. Todd so far we are looking at 5X4 = 20 mezzanine boards. Do you have 20-30 in stock?
Finally I want to stress there is always risk in doing these boards. Probably less than normal this time, since I only made one very minor change to the last run I did on the RAM boards. But again this is a system for experienced people.
John