Blogs

Prototyping the extra Flash ROM has turned out to be harder than I thought. I have decided touse a 8 Mb / 1 MB LPC bus Flash part. Since it uses the LPC bus, there is not a lot of signals to hook up. I tried to find a socket for the chip locally, but no one had one. I will need to order it from Digikey. But for the first prototype, I will just wire it up. This will allow me to get the code debugged. I have added the code to the FPGA, but without the circuit I cannot test it. I was hopeing that I would get some time over the holiday to build the circuit.

My name is "Coius". Wait... It's actually spelled "Coeus". Crap....

I have most of the software switches added to the code to make the system look like an Apple 2. The next task is to add ROM to the system. This ROM is needed for the Monitor, BASIC interpreter, and to hold floppy images while I write and test the floppy emulator. I was looking at Compact Flash devices that can be used under Prodos. The issue with these is the amount of prototyping needed to make them work. I was hopeing for far less signals. I looked at multimedia flash cards (MMC) also. They have less connections and this is probably what I will end up using.