2020 BATCH.
Is almost identical to the original STE V1 design. It fits and works in exactly the same way as before. Probably the only notable difference is that the corner of the board is now "pre-cut" at the PCB factory to miss machines with a socketed blitter.
- IMG_5097.JPG (417.41 KiB) Viewed 6547 times
THE FAQ
I get asked about the
plug-in version a fair bit. This was
abandoned because there are just too many variations on sockets.. Reliability issues in assembly and long-term operation. Also as it was running at 40MHz on a basically experimental firmware, there was some issues which could not be resolved in a 22V10 GAL. In part this is why the current 2020 batch of V1 is more expensive than before, because I basically had to write off all the plug-in boards.
Could all the be resolved I hear you ask ? well the short answer is yes but I just do not have the time to work on the STFM stuff, nevermind the STE. while my
64MHz SEC booster may one day be ported over to the STE..Running a
64MHz only CPU is not going to yield hardly any speed gain over 32MHz.
Basically for starters, the ROM is maxed out at 32MHz. While these are problems we are working on currently with the SEC booster (flash and fast ram etc) but it is likely the long way off because again, we are working on so many projects at once that progress is always incredibly slow. The STE would it need its own version of the project could be done, but again I do not think it is really worth spending time on.. Because the SEC booster is about 95% wired up as a 020 CPU. Only once we have a 64MHz 020 running on the SEC design, will I consider porting it over to the STE. Of course we still have to complete the SEC work and design and test the 020 CPU yet.. so we are easily the year away.
As I said many times in the past, there is nothing to stop people from designing a alt-ram addon board for the STE booster. Its more than capable of interfacing with a external RAM board and running at 32mhz. That would make a extremely fast system!
