Pole Position Clone

04XX cracked!

2011-10-05T17:55:00.000-07:00

10XX cracked!

2011-08-01T10:08:00.000-07:00

Fluke z8000 pod acquired

2011-01-24T10:13:00.000-08:00

Many thanks to fellow KLOV member Paul Olson for lending me his Z8000 pod!!!

This will help me keep my current PP boardset working and experiment with the hardware as well.

Annnnnnnd we're back!

2010-12-23T08:57:00.001-08:00

Well the lab is finally setup and fully operational. With the big bench in place I now have a dedicated station for the PP project. I plan on returning to this project this week

Very excited to make some forward progress...

Lab Status 8/16/10

2010-08-18T07:50:00.000-07:00

For $10???

2010-06-14T05:58:00.000-07:00

Picked this up on Craigslist for a mere $10 the other day.

http://allentown.craigslist.org/ele/1713382784.html

The cables alone are worth $100 combined not to mention the FPGA board itself.

If figure it'll use this to get familiar with the Xilinx toolset before I jump onto the mother of all dev boards. ;)

Mystery Solved

2010-06-07T05:00:00.000-07:00

Shortly after posting this video I was contacted by a development team in China from work that developed this devkit back in 2006.

(Many thanks to Hai Ju!!!!)

It's purpose was to provide a system for Multimedia SoC prototyping and verification. The documentation and specs on this thing have been flowing in. :)

This thing is insanely powerful!

Interestingly enough, their team now works closely with my team on high speed link development (PCI Express, Gigabit Ethernet, etc) yet we never knew of the connection.

Small world!!!

Stay tuned for updates on this. As a first step I'd like to get MikeJ's pacman implementation coded up on this thing.

Mystery Devboard?

2010-06-04T06:57:00.000-07:00

Could I use this for PPClone prototyping and development?

Hmmmmmm......

Lab Status

2010-05-26T12:22:00.001-07:00

Finishing up the drywall in the lab as we speak. Hope to be in sometime this summer.

Crummy health issues and a busted minivan are inhibiting my progress.

Eye candy

2009-08-11T12:01:00.001-07:00

Forgot all about these... piles of NOS z8002's still in their tubes.

As far as an update goes:

I've been working on a lot of board repairs (non PP related) to fund the finishing of my basement lab. It gets damp in the summer and pretty cold in the winter and I find it hard to get motivated (especially during Jan/Feb). A few outside chores to wrap up and then I should be able to get started an that.

10xx headway

2009-04-08T12:37:00.000-07:00

The 10xx custom is nearly done. The system resets and passes all self tests, but the watchdog goes off right before the track appears. Which tells me it's a bus control scenario between the 10xx and the 08xx. I'm tracing the Z80 bus to see where it gets lost in the weeds and once I figure that out, should be an easy fix. Stay tuned for a complete overview on how I've helped automate the reverse engineering of the customs. It's saved me tons of time.

2008-12-20T19:09:00.000-08:00

Holy crap has it been that long??? Been working more on this project these past few weeks but still not as often as I would like. :-(

CPLD success

2007-09-10T19:00:00.000-07:00

Apparently it helps when you:

Install the ByteBlaster Driver (see the ByteBlaster II PDF)
Choose ByteBlaster and not ByteBlasterMV (I have to unplug mine for this option to show up)
Have continuity between the ByteBlaster and the CPLD.

Anyways... now I can see how close my customs are to the real deal....deals....(deals?).... eh you get the point.

"Can you read me?"

2007-09-10T09:26:00.000-07:00

Picked up my programmable device and built my own ByteBlaster but can't seem to program the device. Comparing my byteblaster to the schematic found in the ByteBlaster II datasheet they appear to be different so I may have to modify mine so it looks to be the real thing. Stay tuned....

Breadboard goodness

2007-06-19T12:27:00.000-07:00

Got the 08xx just about figured out. All I need now is a programmable replacement from www.fpgaarcade.com and I can see how close I am. Should also be a good starting point for the 10xx. The pinouts are identical so I suspect there may be some subtle internal differences to accommodate the z8002's Z-bus architecture.

Off and running again

2007-06-04T05:57:00.000-07:00

Spent a few hours working on the Pole board that I have... did some praying...and got it working again.
Now on to the next custom....

One step forward.. two steps back

2007-05-31T06:41:00.000-07:00

Got custom 07xx figured out and was moving onto another when my board started flaking out. :-( Looks like I'll have to go over it and see if I can get it working again. Cloning this system without a 'golden board' is not impossible, but reverse engineering customs and especially comparing simulation to real hardware is going to be tricky.

Z8002 trace adapter

2007-05-01T11:33:00.000-07:00

I was trying to debug the 4F/3F custom I/O and was quickly convinced that there's just not enough room to get grabbers on all the pins as well as some of the Z8002 signals I want to look at (help sme get a good overall understanding as to what the system is doing).
So I quickly whipped up a small PCB that will piggyback on the cpu socket and allow me to plug the pod connectors right on to it. Saves a ton of space and dozens of grabbers to boot.

HP16500 to VCD

2007-04-23T12:59:00.000-07:00

Finished the core of a software utility that takes a trace from an HP16500 and converts it to a VCD (value change dump) file. Now I can compare actual traces from hardware to those from simulation... side by side. Although it took some time to code up (time that could have been spent plying with the PP boardset) it will save me countless hours in the long run. Eventually it will be available for download and will support multiple analyzers and not just the HP16510A (I have 2 in my system)

Welcome...

2007-04-23T12:46:00.000-07:00

Rather than having to decide on a suitable PHPNuke supported blog package and have to host the blog myself... why not let blogger deal with this for me? :-)

That way I can save my free time for actually working on my projects.