I think just a rework of the rom/ram board is all that is needed, but if if there's room, a single uart interface (80c30 or 16550) and a io byte would be nice..., jumpers are best for thing that do not change often...
The IDE and zfdc boards are just fine for disk support....
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Tom Lafleur (858) 759-9692 That really is a whole different board but can be done for sure. Having gotten burned in the past, I hate to hard wire I/O ports. Quickly looking at the Zeta SBC board ports I see for example the FDC ports would be in conflict with the default S-100 IDE board ports (30h-33h), and the MSDOS compatible RTC (70h-71H) on the “MSDOS Support Board” seems to have the same ports but a different clock chip. The 74LS682 do most of the work for port decoding (one chip) and if we use jumpers instead of a switch real estate space in not too bad. How do people feel about the 16550 versus the Zilog 85C30 UART. The latter is more powerful/flexible has two independent serial ports and use up only 4 IO addresses while the 16550 has only one port and uses up 8 IO addresses – something that becomes an issue in larger S-100 systems. Can probably squeeze onboard a parallel port but probably not enough room for something fancy like an 8255. John John, If the idea was to make things as simple and economical to bring up an S-100 CP/M, making the support card provide memory and console is cool, but you would want to clump all the I/O spaces together and place them at zero so you don't need switches and decoders. You would only need to decode as many bits as are require to hit all the actual concatenated I/O spaces. If the memory mapping was the same as SBCV2, that would make things easier also. If you used 16550, that makes things easier also. If you can squeak in a parallel port, that opens it up to PPISD/PPIDEd usage. If you did that, you would have memory, console, and persistent storage. That is the whole ballgame for a minimum system.
Yes. It might make sense to actually try and combine the RAM+ROM and a serial port on one board. The thing that is using up real estate on the REPROM board is trying to have a lot of flexibility on the one board with addressing over the 16MG range 8 bit ROM’s as well as FLASH etc. If we could agree on a priority list working down the list I can squeeze more on, I think. Andrew has worked wonders these days getting stuff on S-100 boards (e.g. 80386!). BTW an “IOBYTE” port is very useful when doing configuration options, may want to consider that as well. We have it on the SMB but not here. From where I stand, a Zeta type system is the closest we can come with several of the S100COMPUTERS boards to a configuration similar to the Zeta. 512Kram 512Krom, serial port for Console, and CF for persistent storage. I am seeking a baseline version, generated from a fork of the RomWBW BIOS and applications. With storage media transportability to SBC V2, Zeta, and N8. Once we have that baseline, we can evaluate and prioritize supporting other Does that answer the question John? Tom what is a “Zeta type system”? Doug and I are working on a version of the ROMwbw CPM that will require an updated rom-ram board. This will be a Zeta type system. So I hope we can get a new one in the que.
Tom. ~~ _/) ~~~~ _/) ~~~~ _/) ~~~~ _/) ~~ Guys if there is enough interest I could do another version of the “EPROM” board. Of the 20 or so boards I have done so far it’s the one I’m least satisfied with. I think we could better splice of 8 bit ROMS, and 8/16 bit RAM/EPROMS/Flash on one board with less confusing jumpers etc. The problem is we would need about 20 boards to hit the $30 breakpoint Doug, Tom, and Leonard;
Excited to hear about your new effort!
http://n8vem-sbc.pbworks.com/w/page/61752020/About%20my%20S-100%20activity
In your deliberations, would you please consider support for the 4MG RAM board (that recent joiners, including myself, have) in addition to the EPROM/RAM/Flash board that I have not (and falls into the unobtanium category at the moment)?
http://s100computers.com/My%20System%20Pages/RAM%20Board/4MG%20RAM%20Board.htm
http://s100computers.com/My%20System%20Pages/PROM%20Board/PROM%20Board.htm
Perhaps the 4MG RAM board can be configured to work comparably so that this dual-support isn't a problem? Online documentation states "You will notice that the board accommodates both static RAM chips, Flash RAM chips and EPROMS (from 2716's all the way up to 27256's)."
I think that explicit support for the 4MG RAM board would open up your audience a bit (more) and aid some of us newbies :->.
Thank you!
paul
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