For $10???

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

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?

Could I use this for PPClone prototyping and development?

Hmmmmmm......

Lab Status

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

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

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.

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. :-(