Good news: Just yesterday, Howard successfully got a stable, correct picture out of OGD1 on the DVI port of Head 0 (dual link, high dot rate). That means we have memory, PCI, and that part of video wired correctly. It won't be too hard for him to test DVI on Head 1. With a little more work, he should have analog on Head 0 tested soon as well.
The testing has been slow for reasons varying from weird behavior of the Xilinx chip to challenges with getting I/O timing just right for the external chips to difficulties debugging the code (some ours, some borrowed) that we're using to perform the tests. I don't know what the bug count is so far, but it's small, and the guy who is implementing the fixes is up to the minute on them, so that will constitute a zero delay when we finally decide to go to production. The fact that we have uncovered a number of bugs is encouraging us to be as thorough as possible in our tests. The concern: The big challenge is going to be the TV chip. The PDF for it is some rediculous length, and we fear that if we are to take the time to understand it well enough to write a proper test, it could take another month at least. (After all, we have our day jobs to contend with.) That gives the OGP two choices: (1) Don't test it. As far as we can tell, all of the pins are connected. And the likelihood of crosstalk or excessive trace delay impacting such a low-speed device is minimal. If it does turn out to be flawed... well, we'll have to consider that when we fab the second or subsequent batch of cards. (2) Get other people to identify for us exactly how to operate the device. It's got tons of configuration registers that we need to figure out and set correctly before we have any hope of getting a signal going in to come out correctly and drive a TV. Howard, Andy, and I just don't have the time to do it. What we need is complete setup for an NTSC TV (if that works, PAL and others will too). Those companies that have queried with us about buying OGD1 boards are NOT interested in the TV chip. Some are not interested in video at all. I'm sure you can understand how this affects how we prioritize our time. I told the FSF that we'd have hardware by the end of January, putting us officially 16 days in the red. -- Timothy Normand Miller http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti Favorite book: The Design of Everyday Things, Donald A. Norman, ISBN 0-465-06710-7 _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
