Where am I?

Well, forget everything I stated before. I seem to be changing my mind fairly regularity these days. I do not know if is because of the lack of sleep or I am being slowly changed by my wife to be more like her. If I was in marketing I would say, I have adapted in an everchanging environment as new information became known to me. Or some BS like that.

Anyway, I did finish the LPC bus interface to a 1 Meg Flash chip. But I have yet to test it, more on why later. I need to test the verilog code to make sure I can read and write from the Flash part. When that is done, I need to program the Flash part with the ROM that I want. Then I can test the remaining verilog code and get a basic APPLE ][+ booting.

But this is just a temporary booting method. I started looking again at Compact Flash as a method of booting and having all the online storage I will ever need. Two things have steered me this way again. The first one being an ATA to Compact Flash adapter which is cheep. I found one locally and I could not resist. Since PRODOS can only use 32 Meg partitions, a small Flash device is all that I really need. I am looking at either a 128 Meg or a 256 Meg device. I have added the verilog code to interface to the ATA. I still have to build a board to adapt the FPGA board to the ATA, but this is not too hard since a lot of it can be one to one. I am a little concerned about the longivity of the Compact Flash device, but small ones are cheep. The second thing that changed my mind is available PRODOS drivers for ATA interfaces on the Internet.

The reason I have not tested the LPC code is not that I have not had time. Even though things have been busy, I could have worked it out. The main reason is the lack of space. For the last several months, I have been living in temporary housing with only enough space for a laptop. Writing the code is do able on the laptop, but setting up the FPGA board, the keyboard, and monitor were not possible in the space that I had. Now I can see the end of the tunnel. I have changed jobs and locations. Bye to the land of sugar and hello to the land of live music. I will be able to move into spacous quarters near the end of the month. Then I should be able to find room to test and build new things.