JezC wrote: Thu Apr 30, 2020 10:50 am
I bit the bullet and ordered one for one of my H4 builds the other week...will have to see if I can save enough to get one for #2 at some point (before the rest of the stock disappears)...otherwise it will be a matter of waiting for the FPGA version I guess...
I think I have one more tube of blitters.. But somewhat reluctant to sell them as once they are gone, that is it
The FPGA version,
@Icky and I was a few months back copying the original blitter over on gate level, but with so many projects going on at the same time, it basically got put on hold. It is difficult to translate the old-style schematics over to more modern stuff. But also I was getting tempted of just optimising the logic as well, as a lot of time it was "why the hell did they do that when they could have just simply done this instead" ... But for the most part I'm trying to keep the logic as identical as possible, but a lot of changes get done because of we don't use differential logic any more in general.
Even so, now
@Icky As the H4 FPGA adapter boards, we are going to simply try using the suska MMU,GLUE,BLITTER cores. In theory they should all play nice together in a stock system.It's not going to be fully compatible with a real ST anymore, but with it being firmware, that could still be developed at a later time.. Though really the project is there to try and build a stable 32MHz system.. I wrote epics on this in other threads before anyway.. Cycle accurate cores is pointless on the faster system anyway.
Again it is also partly why we paused work on the original BLITTER clone... In one respect it might not actually be needed as such... But aside from that, creating a FPGA board just for one chip (blitter), would not really be cost-effective.. So it is still in question if it is worth actually doing it or not.
JezC wrote: Thu Apr 30, 2020 10:50 am
Mind you, if the store is open all the time, there are other iems with similar or lower stock levels that people can hoard as well/instead of (if that's your thing...says someone with over 20 ST's stores on top of shelves/wardrobes around the room
)
Is mostly the ST chipset which is a problem.. As soon as I put those chips in my store they sell... But with them only been obtainable from scrap motherboards, they are somewhat hard to come by.. BUT...
Because I have around 50 working motherboards,I am basically thinking of scrapping the entire lot for spares.. Seems just wrong to do that, but the boards themselves are just not worth spending the time on.. At best I could probably get £50 for a 70789, But I would have to test it out, and knowing how fragile these boards are, it probably would not work when he got to destination anyway... Or I can strip out the MMU,GLUE,SHIFTER and get £50.. not only that, I need a source for the cartridge connectors as well...
A lot of the general sockets and chips are still obtainable... And I have been slowly building up stocks of them in my store as time goes on.. I literally have a box full of chips I need to test... I'm just greatly lacking in time as always..
