RE: [N8VEM-S100:272] Request For Comments (NIC Board)

["Andrew Lynch" <lyn...@yahoo.com>]

Hi Mike!  Neat idea!  You've got some great S-100 designs we should make
into prototype boards and make available for the other S-100 builders.  

Have you updated your original S-100 site on the pikeaero.com website?  I
can't seem to find it anymore.  Maybe you've moved the S-100 boards to the
http://8bit.zapto.org/ website?  I recall there were other boards you were
working on as well like the M8X8, MEM64, HI8, and SPI80 designs.  Would you
please add those links to the 8bit.zapto.org site as well?

At the moment, I am working with John Monahan and others on various S-100
projects.  My plate is pretty full at the moment but maybe we could do some
community projects to get some of those boards prototyped.  Once they go
through the community build and test, I will offer them along with the other
boards.

Making a small batch of prototype boards is not cheap but the best deal I've
seen is www.33each.com since they'll produce 5 S-100 boards for $150.  I
would be glad to organize some of the S-100 builders to do some build and
test like we are going with the S-100 68K CPU board.  Rich Leary, John
Monahan and I are working on an S-100 6502 CPU board along similar lines.

If we can get five volunteer builders to buy a prototype board at $30 each
we can order a batch of prototypes.  There would be some overlap with the
existing S100computers.com and N8VEM boards but I don't see a problem with
that.  Also, my friend Neil pointed out there are some other home brew S-100
designs we could use although I don't fear running out of new ideas anytime
soon.  :-)

Maybe we start with the NIC4 board?  Hopefully other builders will chime in.

Thanks and have a nice day!

Andrew Lynch

> -----Original Message-----
> From: n8vem...@googlegroups.com [mailto:n8vem...@googlegroups.com] On
> Behalf Of mike
> Sent: Thursday, June 09, 2011 2:30 AM
> To: n8vem...@googlegroups.com
> Subject: [N8VEM-S100:272] Request For Comments (NIC Board)
> 
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> Hi All,
> 
> I just sketched out a design for a 4-port Ethernet S-100 card. I likely
> won't get around to producing this for a while since I have enough on my
> plate to keep me busy for quite some time, but it would be good to start
> getting the ball rolling a little bit on something like this.
> 
> http://www.8bit.geek/index.php/s100-cards-in-development/nic4-4-port-
> ethernet-card
> 
> In a nutshell, it has an on-board Z/80 that bit-bangs an SPI bus
> inter-connecting 4 ENC28J60 MAC/PHY ICs, and the Z80 has 32K of ram to
> use as scratchpad and buffer space. The S100 master has access to a 4K
> window at the bottom of the Z80s 32K RAM. There is one I/O port for
> communicating comamnds and status between the S100 master and teh
> on-board Z/80. The Z/80 can interrupt the bus master and interrupt
> vector(s) are software programmable.
> 
> Welcoming comments.
> 
> - --Mike
> 
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