Tickled_Pink Posted December 12, 2004 Share Posted December 12, 2004 Decided to try and get some work done on the A8 over christmas. The idea is to design a new A8 motherboard - it will still need to use existing Atari custom chips, though, until someone can put together a working FPGA. Hopefully the footprint of the new board will be smaller than the existing XL/XE design without using SMD parts. One way it will achieve that is by getting rid of the dynamic RAM chips, the BIOS and Atari Basic ROMs. These will be replaced by a single non-volatile 128K static RAM, rather than Flash. Hopefully it'll be a project that I can work on for just half an hour a day (no time for anything longer). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carmel_andrews Posted July 20, 2005 Share Posted July 20, 2005 so basically what your saying is, your goona have the atari running out of 2 fpga chips, 1 for the hardware/proc's etc and one for the rom's/op sys's etc will it be keyboard and joystick compat. how are you going to go about sio compat. or will you just use usb and allow a8 users to d/l atr's/xex's or com/exe files from the net onto your l'il system thru usb will you be able to emulate dual antic/gita or stereo pokey u/g's will you also support other 650x/65xxx proc's, the ones i thinking or are 65816 and compat's will you also support the various and all disk drive u/g's, lazer, duplicator, isplate, SA2, happy etc, if your keeping sio compat. Will you also support non atari dev's like usb storage dev's, ide, scsi, for large harddrives (40gig+) cd/dvd writers etc) Will you be able to use the popular o/s replacements like supermon, omnimon, ultimon, os controller card, qmeg args os etc will it be compat. with the popular pbi/eci add ons (like floppy boards, black box etc, hard drives etc... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
danwinslow Posted July 20, 2005 Share Posted July 20, 2005 If you need software help, let me know. Especially if the 65c816 is involved. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tickled_Pink Posted July 20, 2005 Author Share Posted July 20, 2005 Sadly the project is in hiatus at the moment. No time for anything beyond a little coding ... and certainly no money to finance any hardware developments. If anything happens in the future I'll post it here. I'll probably continue working on the specifications and CAD design over the next few months whenever I get the chance. But to answer the questions: No FPGA chips - haven't a clue how to code them. The idea was to redesign the motherboard to add more features built-in whilst increasing the options for simple upgrading. The specifications were changed to turn it into an ATX-style board or one that could fit into an ST case. Shrinking it would make it harder to upgrade. The system would revert back to a 4 joystick port system. It would include USB and SIO for backward compatibility. The SIO would be as a pin header. In relation to the dual antic/gtia and dual pokey, this was the idea - the dual pokey would be fitted as standard. A prospect of a dual antic/gtia only came to light recently and wasn't included in the original spec. The processor remains a sticking point and I'm open to suggestions. Haven't decided what to do about it. The 65816 would be an attractive proposition. But if it was decided to use a 6502, it would be a standard 65C02 - not Atari's version. How that might affect software that uses illegal opcodes, I'm not sure. There will be an onboard IDE, dual PIA and standard Parallel interface. It will also include some other built-in goodies. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ijor Posted July 21, 2005 Share Posted July 21, 2005 But if it was decided to use a 6502, it would be a standard 65C02 - not Atari's version. How that might affect software that uses illegal opcodes, I'm not sure. It will break them completely. It is important if you want your system to run original software. Many protections are based on those opcodes. And they are sometimes still there even after they were cracked. It might be even break compatibility when no undocumented/illegal opcodes are used. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
danwinslow Posted July 21, 2005 Share Posted July 21, 2005 Personally, in this case I say screw compatibility. If we want to play old games, we have plenty of ways to do that already. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carmel_andrews Posted July 21, 2005 Share Posted July 21, 2005 what with... 400/800 or Xl/xe Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ijor Posted July 21, 2005 Share Posted July 21, 2005 Personally, in this case I say screw compatibility. Yes, that's a reasonable approach. I was just noting that, *if* you are avoiding a 65816 for compatiblity reasons, then a 65C02 might be not compatible enough either. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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