Author Archives: aslak

IO board bring up

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The IO boards arrived about a week after putting the order in. The front of one of the boards: And the back: Interestingly I received two extra boards. An extra usable board and another one. The other board had been used for some kind of testing by the manufacturer as it had a piece cut out of it. The box… Read more »

Progress on the VGA, Keyboard, Sound and IDE board

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The IO board for the MINI000, outlined in the last post, has been designed and the PCB, pending some final checks, will soon be ordered from the allpcb.com PCB house in China. A few ICs have not made it. I’d hoped to include a MC68230 (PDF) but as they are available only in DIP48, there’s just not enough room for… Read more »

Thoughts on future projects (68K!)

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This blog post does not document what I’ve done in my hobbies, except for some small projects, but rather what I plan to work on next. Before getting to that though, I should finish my description of the progress I’ve made with the VGA controller. I have attached the  EPF10K10 (PDF) FPGA to the 68000 CPU bus, and have had… Read more »

VGA signal generation with an EPF10K10 FPGA

This post has been a long time in the making. I’ve been distracted by various things: work, family, and CNC related projects. I will create a short post describing my first successfully completed CNC project after this one, since I’m pretty proud of it. But onto the topic at hand. The road to a video display began with a stand-alone breadboard… Read more »

Monitor progress and thoughts on the 68000 ISA

The machine-code monitor for my MINI000 68000 SBC is coming along nicely. It’s been great fun and an excellent introduction to writing 68000 assembly. Command processing consists of the following steps: Read a line of text from the serial port. Parse the line into command and argument portions. Locate the command from the set available. This will result in a… Read more »

Adding a C library to the 68000 SBC

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There are more than a few different choices of C library for running on small systems. Some candidate C libraries for the MINI000 board include: Newlib is an extremely popular choice for small systems. It is relatively complete. Not quite complete enough for a modern desktop Unix system, but almost. It specifically targets bare-bones (AKA freestanding) 68K systems, and allows… Read more »

MPCNC “finished” and progress with the 68000 SBC

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The MPCNC is now ready to be used in anger. It took longer then I’d have liked but it’s all ready for serious cutting, albeit in wood: Making the spoil-board up was a bit of a mission, mostly because I’m completely new to this kind of thing. I started with a 600mm by 1220mm by 18mm thick piece of MDF…. Read more »