Date   : Sun, 05 Mar 2006 23:38:48 +0000
From   : Fragula <fragula@...>
Subject: Re: Warning: Sad case on list!

Hi John!

John Kortink wrote:

[Re: Sprow Arm 2p]
> It's fantastic. And you gotta love its potential (whatever
> may actually be realised ...).
Indeedy. The idea is growing on me. More so since I saw how much the
32016 went for this evening! Sense got the better of me at £100. ISTR I
gave a tenner for the ACW with the 10MHz/4MB Board and a 20MB hard disk,
it needed a little cleaning internally, but has been fairly reliable
since, with light use due to the heat and noise.

[Impure GoMMC]
>>Oh my yes.. You've used one of those?
> Well, I'm bound to, since I created it. ;-)
Ah.. I'll assume you know a little about it then.

I have to confess, I found myself looking at MMCs in Tesco this
afternoon. :-/ Its probably only a matter of time before I crack, but
I'm persisting with the FDFS at the moment.

>>Its memory footprint is just the same as a 27128 yes?
> Yes.
>>No flying wires?
> Not required, no. More details on my website.
Ahh.. Disk Images. Dirty Dirty Dirty! Can't format it like a winchester
and use ADFS?

> I know. But it's rather costly in terms of FPGA real estate.
> The FPGAs that can handle it all will be expensive.
Ah. yes. Not cheap at all, flexible, powerful, elegant, fun, but not cheap.

Look at something like 500 sobs for a reasonable FPGA. More if you want
to chase Opteron floating point.

ISTR the latest ones my mate is playing with are "rated for 500MHz",
he's clocking his core (licenced one, sadly) at a gig. Apparently it
gets a bit hot. I've suggested a bigger heatsink, or pouring beer on it
to keep it cool.

DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME CHILDREN, but alcohol boils fairly easily and is
great for cooling things, and he's a homebrewer. Alcohol is also fairly
flammable, and in consumable beverage state, i.e. vodka and orange, for
a tried and tested axample, is a great conductor, even at TTL voltages.

 > Well, it won't be that spectacular at 64 MHz div something
> like 5-20. But compared to the old 2ps a decent speedup
> should be obtainable.
Didn't the orginal Acorn BBC/6502 emulator run quite well (around
30..50% of the real thing), on a 4MHz ARM? (Its what I heared, possibly
from someone on this list,

We could probably look at multiplying that, first proportionally by
clock rate, then by CPU enhancements, then by nice peer-reviewd ARM
assembly language, and its not driving an Arc, just a Tube ULA. Should
go like buggeroonie on a stick. Does the Sprow ARM 2p have some kind of
reference clock the emulator could be could be throttled against without
tying up a VIA on the I/O processor?

Must wind down, must get sleep. All Excited. Got DOS+ and GEM going on
the 80186. Have to check out omniflop against some genuine singled
density FM stuff.. its pretty darned impressive so far, but I'm not
gonna rip up Uniform, BeebDOS, Teledisk, 22disk, Anadisk, Matchpoint,
and the rest just yet.

Oh.. in case anyone was wondering, it's compatible with the <spit>
Nforce 1 southbridge, so an Xbox port isn't quite out of the question
<wink> the Nforce was the nearest "standard PC" I had to hand.

Cheers!

M.