What's next for S100 Boards?

[yoda <yo...@r2d2.org>]

I would like to open a thread on what people are interested in?   Andrew mentioned a couple of things in terms of 64K I/O board and SMB, etc.  I would like to know what people are thinking and what they are working on so I don't duplicate work in progress.  I know Andrew mentioned a new SMB board - can Andrew or John give ideas of what they are thinking (we can't be single threaded by John - at least I hope not!).   I have a bunch of ideas and that is why I pushed the regular proto board order by buying 10 of them.

Here are some of my thoughts and ideas and would like to know what interest level there is.

1)   A "super I/O board" - probably have a propeller on it, CF IDE card, and 3.5 inch floppy controller.

2)   An intelligent SMB board - probably with a bunch of FIFOs for the signals coupled to a propeller or probably a raspberry pi.  WIth a pi we could have intelligent disassembler modules that would allow you to disassemble the last instructions before the breakpoint along with display of all the control signals as well (think an S100 ICE with processor knowledge). This board could also double as a console I/O by using another window as the console.   This will be a pretty interesting software project as well

3)   A 16M memory board using an SDRAM chip (many available cheaply) - the trick here is designing the refresh circuit - will require some thought on how to do this.  If can be done minimally then may fit on board 1 as well.

To implement these I am planning on using some CPLDs as glue chips that are still available in PLCC format.  This would require a JTAG programmer (available on ebay for 30 - 40 dollars generally).  How do people feel about that?  Also in regards to programming on the host side I tend to prefer Mac OSX and can do Linux as well as the code is generally compatible between the two.  I don't really like windows anymore and try to stay away from it.

In regards to processors, I don't like the Intel architecture and will probably not develop anything there.  I really like the 68K and most of my initial work will be there getting CP/M 68K running and looking at emuTOS and MINT as other alternatives as well.   I also like the idea of 6809 and 6502 as the 6809 Flex looks interesting.

I will also be exploring the Propeller II which I think might be available in the late summer or early fall timeframe as well - I keep my eye of the Parallax Forums as well.

These are the ideas I am kicking around as well as working on the 68360 SBC that Andrew and I are working on.  It is planned to be a 68040 implementation as some point but I wonder is that is really something that people want - any comments?   I think doing a Linux bring up on that is really getting away from the retro era (even some of my proposals above do that as well).   I don't plan to tackle Linux porting as I have done that before and it is really not an interest to me as my day job I work on commercial version of SYSV operating system so that gets too close to what I do and I would rather work on older operating systems.

Please feel free to comment here as what people are looking for and any projects that are currently underway - it is probably not useful to duplicate work and if other are interested in what I am proposing we can probably team up to get some of these ideas into real hardware / software quicker

Dave