First post, by BitWrangler
- Rank
- l33t++
Hi Vogons,
I was just casting an eye over a Lava Computers, dual parallel PCI card when "lulwat? That's a Xilinx Spartan!"
It has got one of these puppies on it.. XCS05 ...
https://www.digchip.com/datasheets/parts/data … 4/XCS05-pdf.php
They still appear to sell that model at lavalink.com unless photo is out of date, it's not super rare to find them used.
I am not sure my head is done exploding yet, but I am thinking there's gotta be a retro killer app for this, some interfacing to old gear that might now be done with a PCI only machine. Something you can't get in PCI or costs over $100+
Running through things like; bitbang CGA, not a lot of point, too many ISA cards not enough monitors and 486 is overpowered for anything you need CGA for. Gameport, nope, enough soundcards do it... Then other things come to mind that I think, yah, probably doesn't make it a lot easier than IF to a parallel port and that would be more universal.
There is a slight chance it could do an 8 bit ISA slot, haven't mathed out all the lines available.
Not sure there's enough logic to give you an internal non-x86 machine emulation, thinking like Apple II in a desktop terminal, PET maybe, the more interesting stuff has additional support hardware. However, it might serve as the "glue" to another board, using original CPU or custom chips, or full on emulation in a Pi type board. Raw chip might be enough for some older basic functionality FPGA cores for some systems, but not sure how much the PCI interfacing consumes.
Maybe it's more useful as a bench tool, punking the parallel port code and tweaking to make it more useful as a logic analyser for other boards.
Anyway, just seems to me there's opportunity here, even if I can't define it, so see if you can come up with anything...
Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.