Date   : Wed, 02 May 2007 18:53:24 -0500
From   : julesrichardsonuk@... (Jules Richardson)
Subject: Arthur on 5.25" media...

Jonathan Graham Harston wrote:
>>> seem to recall that the M4 and A680 have Brazil firmware, but is that true
>> I don't know what Brazil is, so I can't answer that except to say that
>> the string "Brazil" doesn't appear in the ROM, which is only 16Kbytes,
>> so presumably not.  Remember the A680 post-dates the A500 and the AES by
>> about 4 years.

I didn't realise they were so far apart! Wow.

> Brazil and Springboard is an ARM development/evaluation system
> plugged into a PC. The system code for it is at
> http://mdfs.net/Mirror/Archive/Acorn/Spring.zip
>  
> I think Brazil is the hardware and Springboard is the software.

Brazil was the software; Acorn called it an OS (at least internally) but in 
reality I seem to recall it's little more than a monitor program and 
boot-loader. 64KB of ROM code on both the Springboard and M4 - however I just 
checked and the A680 ROM dump is 512KB, suggesting it used something totally 
different.

If the AES ROM is only 16KB though it suggests that it used something else 
entirely.

> I've not seen a picture of it, but it /could/ be a standard ARM
> EvalKit or A500 plugged into a PC interface.

I've got two flavours of Springboard [1] here. Both are full-length ISA cards; 
the later one uses 30-pin SIMMs and has an expansion connector on it, whilst 
the earlier one doesn't have the expansion socket and uses individual DRAM chips.

The only ROM set I have is labeled as v1.30 - I'm not sure whether it's 
generic enough to work with both boards or not. I've got the same software 
release here as you.

[1] at least I think they're both technically "Springboards". One is p/n 
0260,000 and labeled "PC ARM co-processor", and the other's p/n 0260,005 and 
labeled "PC ARM Application card".

cheers

Jules