On Fri, 25 Oct 2002, ZN wrote:
> I would still lean towards the 68SZ328.
Can it support:
A simple expansion interface?
Some kind of expandable flash area?
What roughly would be the cost of such a system, and the design period? I
understand the issue with it being a BGA, as I have had to deal with that
once with the 7500FE in a mBGA package, where the boards had to be sent
off for x-ray checks of the mounting. *shudders*
> - effectively a 66MHz 68000 (and could possibly be made to run a bit faster
> than that)
If the "manufacturer" routinely stuck a nice big fat heatsink on it?
> - 'connect the dots' system design - has everything on the chip and
> interfaces with everything else with, in most cases, 0 glue logic. In
> particular things that every system needs to have, such as SDRAM, Flash,
> peripherals... this all means that designing the hardware is easy and
> quick.
Would this require custom logic? CPLDs? Any of those other little
complexities that slow down a design? :o)
> What all of this amounts to is that one could put all of the existing (and
> some not yet existing) features of a well appointed QL onto a standard euro
> size board (or even smaller).
What I was playing around with on my ARM design (and I just KNOW what
Nasta's gonna say about this!) was more mechanical than electronic. A
eurocard with standard mounts, and at one end it had two upward facing
slots for 1/2 length eurocards (ie a 160x100mm base with room for two
80mmx100mm expansion cards facing upward), with any connectors along the
back edge. This gave room for it to sit under two drive bays in a
160x180x60mm enclosure. Now, if that was stretched out to be a more
QL-shaped enclosure, that opens up even more options.
> RAM is currently cheap enough that one could
> simply stick on the maximum possible size and leave it there (I believe
> that's 64MB but there are tricks to expand this as the internal addressing
> is 32 bit).
I suspect making the "trick" standard might be a smart idea.
> The negatives:
> 2) Video goes up to 1024x512 max and 65536 colors, but is in practice is
> limited by the total data rate from memory, as it's a shared memory system
> (like the original QL).
And just like the ARM7500FE. It's a trade-off of colour-depth against
resolution. I would take a sweet 256k high res desktop over a chunky
65536-colour desktop any day of the week - but generally, the window
managers are so disappointing graphically that more colours don't really
give anything... (imho, personally, for me. ymmv!)
> A genie in a lamp so I can wish away the cr*p that is going to happen in
> the next two months as I prepare to move and then move back to Croatia.
> More about that privately, if you want - or you can give me a ring.
Could you email me your number and I can call you this evening? It'll save
me having to go through the hundreds of emails in my Nasta folder looking
for it - rereading ONE of your epic emails takes a good while!;)
Dave
