Commander X16

Hello Everyone! I know it's been awhile since there has been an update, so here goes:

Earlier this year I had mostly completed the "Proto #2" motherboard. It was a mad dash to get the PCB made before we met in New Jersey at VCF. Right at the end, @Frank van den Hoef made a pretty substantial change to the VERA, which required a bit of reworking. April came, the trip was cancelled and life went sideways for a bit for the world. As such, I decided I needed to focus on a few things for TexElec, and took a bit of time off from the project.

Last month I picked up where I left off and planned to make minor changes for the VERA and get the PCB made. However, the team had some time to think and oversights and optimizations became apparent. One change led to another, and let's just say, we're gonna break some code. Sorry. ?



I do believe the changes made will not disappoint. I'm not going to reveal them just yet. I am still laying out the PCB and would like to do some testing to make sure it's going to work as designed. I am trying not to release too much of the schematic until the end, as anything is subject to change at this point.



The pic below is how I have the expansion bus pinned out. I may well move some the pins around to simplify layout, so again, not in stone yet, but I do think this is pretty close to what pins will be present. This post is majorly TLDR already, so I'll add a comment below with more info on the pins, and the idea behind some of it.



Take care!

On 6/4/2020 at 9:43 PM, StephenHorn said:

I couldn't help wondering if something major was in the works, given how slow the x16-emulator repo has been recently to discuss, approve, or deny pull requests. I'll be excited to learn more about the changes to the system!

5 hours ago, BruceMcF said:

That's a relief to see the +/-12V lines outside the VCC and +3.3v lines, rather than next to signal lines.

On 6/4/2020 at 6:05 PM, Kevin Williams said:

Hello Everyone! I know it's been awhile since there has been an update, so here goes:

Earlier this year I had mostly completed the "Proto #2" motherboard. It was a mad dash to get the PCB made before we met in New Jersey at VCF. Right at the end, @Frank van den Hoef made a pretty substantial change to the VERA, which required a bit of reworking. April came, the trip was cancelled and life went sideways for a bit for the world. As such, I decided I needed to focus on a few things for TexElec, and took a bit of time off from the project.

Last month I picked up where I left off and planned to make minor changes for the VERA and get the PCB made. However, the team had some time to think and oversights and optimizations became apparent. One change led to another, and let's just say, we're gonna break some code. Sorry. ?



I do believe the changes made will not disappoint. I'm not going to reveal them just yet. I am still laying out the PCB and would like to do some testing to make sure it's going to work as designed. I am trying not to release too much of the schematic until the end, as anything is subject to change at this point.



The pic below is how I have the expansion bus pinned out. I may well move some the pins around to simplify layout, so again, not in stone yet, but I do think this is pretty close to what pins will be present. This post is majorly TLDR already, so I'll add a comment below with more info on the pins, and the idea behind some of it.



Take care!

Kevin, may I be so bold as to request a memory mapped 16 bit ISA slot on the ATX board. seems like a nice option for adding vintage sound cards. 

7 minutes ago, Perifractic said:

38 minutes ago, -N2 said:

Kevin, may I be so bold as to request a memory mapped 16 bit ISA slot on the ATX board. seems like a nice option for adding vintage sound cards. 

Please post this in the feature requests forum, thank you.