[Lancelot] Something to watch out for...

[H. Peter Anvin]

Tommy Thorn wrote:
> H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> 
>> Probably... want to try it out with "assign cf_power = 1;"?
> 
> Sure.  This WE hopefully.
> 
>> I'm going to release version 11 of the ABC80 project as soon as it 
>> finishes doing a clean synthesis, and include a new CF card image.  
>> The CF card image has programs to set the character set to 
>> Swedish/Finnish (default), Danish/Norwegian, or "international" (US).  
>> The cool part is I actually wrote the card on the ABC80; just uploaded 
>> the files with TERM100 (terminal program), which -- much to my 
>> surprise -- worked right out of the box, and -- even more surprising 
>> -- without being dependent on CPU speed.  I'm guessing it's using the 
>> 128 µs interrupt to do its thing.

> Very cool.  Do you have an idea of how many has tried your ABC80 
> implementation (besides us two :-)?

I would guess probably noone :(

>> It's a darn tempting thing, because you get an EP2S60 "for a limited 
>> time".

http://www.altera.com/products/ip/processors/nios2/kits/ni2-dev_kits.html

The Stratix II chip looks substantially bigger than the Cyclone chip, 
and is in a 672-pin package.  I wonder if that means the annoying pin 
sharing on the Cyclone board isn't there -- unfortunately the manual and 
the schematic aren't online yet.  I still wish they had an SDRAM slot.

> I looked again, and I can't find that.  Where did you see this?
> 
>> Unfortunately that means that you won't be able to get updates once 
>> your one-year subscription expires, since it won't work with webpack.

Actually, from looking at it it says "one year *license*" and no updates 
at all.  That might mean it dies after a year.  Would be bad.

> Heh, WebPACK is Xilinx.  Altera is Quartus II Web Edition.  Yeah, I know.

Whatever :)

	-hpa