REV 3 - REV 5 - The beginning (ST536)

[exxos]

Lots of good information in there. I wanted to leave my on-board ROM in place because a) it is actually a complete bastard to remove (it's under the RAM board which is harder to pry off than a dog that's taken a liking to your leg) and b) my expansion's designed to be switched off entirely as it's going to be ages until compatibility is decent enough to even think about having it always on. *

Yeah, I really have no idea why Atari put the ROM underneath the RAM board :roll: But considering how borderline is the timing for "Zero wait states" with the original ROMs, I wonder if Atari tried to blow the fan on it to keep it cooler and make it work, and ultimately gave up and added the wait state jumpers instead :shrug:

*cough* bloody DSP *cough*.

All those chips running on all sorts of different clocks :hide: :)

In fact, my 'off' mode is really a slave mode where my (flash) ROM can be reprogrammed. It appears in a different address range that you can write to with a special program. It takes about a minute to reflash 512k and if you flash something unbeatable, you just drop back to 'off' mode with its own ROM.

Having a off mode is always something I always add to my stuff, going back to stock is always useful :) Well other than the TF536... I think people will have bigger problems with the fact it as a 030 with TOS206 and trying to run original software before even speed comes into it all.

But at least now some of your answers when we were trying to get that low-byte decode working make a lot more sense to me! :lol:

Welcome to the party then I guess ? :lol: :cheers:

[Badwolf]

Welcome to the party then I guess ? :lol: :cheers:

:cheers:

And my CPLDs showed up today so hope to be back in the game this weekend... :fire: :fire: :comp:

BW

[exxos]

And my CPLDs showed up today so hope to be back in the game this weekend... :fire: :fire:

:thumbup: :fire: :fire: :fire:

[exxos]

Just to keep people in the loop, I am going to open up a page on my website to summarise what is going on and upload firmware etc. I think it will be easier to find on my website than on the forum. Any news will still be posted in this thread..

[Steve]

Awesome Chris - by the way will any of your firmware improvements be able to be flashed on a regular TF536 like what I'm using on my H5?

[JezC]

@Steve No, I think it's not compatible with the existing TF536 hardware...pretty sure @exxos mentioned it very early in this topic.

Shame, but that's the price of progress.
I might fit my original TF536 boards into my two Amiga 500s...if I can fix them!

[exxos]

Awesome Chris - by the way will any of your firmware improvements be able to be flashed on a regular TF536 like what I'm using on my H5?

Not compatible no. It was deliberate because my full version will probably be cheaper than the Amiga guys are selling them. I didn't want to steal all their customers of people buying mine and flashing it with Amiga firmware. Atari market is very small , which is better for me in a way as I don't have to build 100s of them up etc.

Its not just firmware, I fixed the IDE port ( not made yet ) and did some other hardware changes which are not on the original one. I have wondered about changing the TF536 number to prevent confusion, but its why I'm calling it ST EDITION currently.. This will be all explained on my site anyway.

The original TF536 doesn't have ROM on board either.. So there is just no way to make it compatible anyway.

[Steve]

Ah no worries, I guess I could always buy your version when it is ready & then pass mine back to the Amiga folke. It's odd you didn't get IDE working on your tf536, mine seems to be working ok (I got mine from @PhilC) But I think I'll need to get a different CPU, runs okay on games but when running Mint it cooks like crazy and crashes/corrupts the mint install.

[exxos]

The IDE port needed a twisted cable which wasn't simple to do. So I changed the pinout on the rev 3 to avoid the need.. Though to many late nights etc, I wired it up wrong. So the rev 3 IDE port just isn't worth messing about with. Its one reason the rev 3 will be cheaper as it doesnt have a functioning ide port.

But also I will need to adapt the code to work on the faster cpu speed.. Then it needs testing etc... But if the rev3 doesn't get much interest then there's no use doing any more work on it all.

[stephen_usher]

Re: Name. Maybe ask @terriblefire if it would be OK to put an 'S' prefix on the name, i.e. STF536?