Re: An ARM CPU on the S100 bus

Hi John,

both Vince and Andrew have made mention of an interest in seeing a version of DEC mini computer technology brought onto the S100 bus (if this is possible).

This idea is beginning to grow on me and I would like to add my interest to the number (now 3 :-) )

I have no experience whatsoever in this area of vintage computing, but what a trip down the history of computing it could be.

I noticed that the HD1-6120 seems to be available in small numbers (including from UT source)

http://www.ebay.com/sch/Business-Industrial-/12576/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=hd1-6120

and also the DCJ11 although price is somewhat higher

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=dcj11

or maybe some other significant vintage mini...., again I'm not sure how practical a suggestion this is but with the Z80 done and the Intel x86 track done my processor interests are now covered.

regards

David Fry

On Tuesday, July 29, 2014 6:58:58 PM UTC+1, monahanz wrote:

I have been doing some long term planning as to the direction I would take in doing new S100 boards. To recap, we now have a 6502, Z80, 8080 (Josh), 68000, 8088, 8086, 80286 and soon an 80386 set of boards on the S1000 bus. Andrew and I have already started laying out an 80486 board.

Since I do a lot of flying on business I have time to read up on chips and recently I have been thinking what would be the best way to get ARM CPU's on the bus. There are many types, and while one could start with a bare chip it does seem to make more sense to start with an embedded module. There are many of these, most of which boot up Linux immediately. One particular one I'm fairly impressed with is an Italian one called "Aria G25" see:-

http://www.acmesystems.it/aria

Also it lends itself to easy pin splicing/layout on a board. It has good documentation and software support. I particularly like the fact that it has 60 GPIO pins. These could be easily spliced into our S100 bus so we could use our current boards for I/O. (In fact at 400MHz, one could also use the S100 RAM!). I know some of you will view this as sticking a Lamborghini engine in a Volkswagen, but would it not be neat to see Linus running on the S100 bus.

Comments please, in particular I would be interested in any other similar modules.

John