anakin@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu (Wolfgang P. Dinger) (05/25/88)
With the help of Transactor magazine I am about to try a little experiment in public domain hardware. In the Volume 1 issue #3 which comes out the third week in June which is actually the August issue, (some of you who know and love Transactor will appreciate the humour here), I am publishing an article on a 68020-68881 platform board called," LUCAS", for the Amiga 1000. To go along with the article Transactor and I are going to make the bare PCB's available as cheaply as possible. The 68020 and the 68881 runs asyncronously at 16 Meg. It consists of the 68020-68881 pair, 4 Pals (we will make these available as well) 4 discretes some SIPs and Caps and two connectors. One to fit into the 68000 socket and one for a future 32 bit wide ram expansion board. The only connection to the Amiga is through the 68000 socket. Circuit diagrams, Pal equasions, and a technical overview will be presented in the article. The board works with many expansion boards like Comspec memory and hard disk, Microbotics Starboard, and Easyl,these are the ones I have. I will post lists of compatible and uncompatible expansion boards as they develop. The problem with public domain hardware is coping with the deluge of problems with non-functional boards. I will help by making my E mail addresses available and responding to regular mail through Transactor. If there is sufficient interest out there perhaps some of you who understand the fine skill of soldering could help some of those less manually skilled. It is only about a hour job to solder all sockets and discretes in place. I have nothing against anyone making a modest sum for the task, but I have made this available so people can get the board installed for as cheaply as possible. Perhaps some of the hardware oriented members of your local user group could be convinced to show you their prowess. Perhaps we can resurrect some of those 1000's out there as dedicated rendering machines. Once the article is out, if anyone wants the Net List or plot files so that the form factor (and other considerations) can be changed to make the board fit in a 500, you can have them for what it costs to send them to you. (They were done using P-CAD on er.... an AT.) I'd do it but I'd like to see my family again, they say I have a son now.