Various comments

[Wouter de Waal]

On Wed, 26 Oct 1994, John S Gwynne wrote:
> 
> | My requirements are that I can use the system at home to play with, as
> | well as in the car. This means that I have some widely separate requirements,
> | such as an IDE interface and possibly VGA, at least Hercules display, and
> | a PC keyboard port. And DRAM. On the other hand I want battery backed up
> 
> Does this mean you will buy, say, a 'PC' video card and plug it into your
> board? If so, I've heard this can be fairly difficult to do if your are not
> using a 80x86 variant since all 'PC' cards (such as the video card) carries
> its own boot-rom. One must read, decode, then re-write a new boot
> routine. Most people find it easier to just buy the video chip set and make
> their own board. (maybe that's what you meant) (If you do either, I would
> like to know.)
Apparently Cyliax (If you havn't heard of him, he's a guy that built a 
68030 workstation that uses PC VGA & IDE cards, & dram) had problems with 
DMA and VGA. Yes, you have to rewrite the BIOS. But you have to do that 
for the "buy a chipset" solution too, and its cheaper to buy a generic 
VGA card, not to mention the free PCB. But, as you know, I'm a masochist.
> 
> I would agree with Dirk, "Go with a serial port..." If you need more, I would
> think about having a 'PC' communicating to the controller (IMHO).  Oh, and
> don't forget gdb can be configured to work as a remote debugger over the
> serial port. No need for the Borland stuff :).
Maybe you're right there. gosub Think_Hard_And_Long. But I still want IDE 
and floppy support, IDE is just a buffer, maybe I should look out for an 
easy 68K floppy controller circuit.

Thanks
Wouter