Date   : Wed, 27 Jul 2005 09:59:25 +0000
From   : Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...>
Subject: Re: ARM copros, speech cartridges, real time

On Wed, 2005-07-27 at 01:35 +0100, Jonathan Graham Harston wrote:
> > Message-ID: <Marcel-1.53-0726155926-965xSBG@...>
>  
> Johan Heuseveldt <johan@...> wrote:
> > > I think the most reasonable solution would be to program a FPGA to act as
> > > an Tube/Serial/Video ULA.
> > 
> > There's a misconception here.
> > 
> > Serial and Video ULAs belong to the Beeb as system properties. The
> > Tube ULA belongs to the CoPro, for which the host-side is seen by the
>  
> Unless you want to give the external processor its own serial
> and/or video system. The Torch Z80 coprocessors has their own
> serial port,

Only the 'Tosca' boards - and they're not very common. The standard
boards were purely a Z80 with all I/O done through the BBC.

Other than the A500 setup, I'm not aware of any others which used
something other than the beeb for I/O. Even the Torch UNIX systems still
ran disks etc. via the 1MHz bus on the beeb side. The Graduate had a
proper ISA bus though, so I imagine it's possible to route video etc.
via that rather than the beeb if needed. All the standard apps for it
just use the beeb though.

cheers

J.