Ryan,
> While I'm anticipating the arrival of the ShaBLAMM card I bought, my mind
> has been flying through ideas of how to make it useful. I'm sure NT will
> work fine, but Linux will probably take a bit of work to boot.
It's most likely hard-wired little-endian.
> The primary problem that comes to my mind is how to figure out which
> signals the 486 board has to send to the Nitro in order for it to become
> active. After that, I'll need to figure out how the board communicates
> with the bus and the host processor...
Unreliable memories of unreliable conversations long ago...
I'm pretty sure Shablamm!! is ROM-less. From power up it looks like a
chunk of memory which the x86 host fills with a program and then
toggles a register bit to unleash the MIPS.
The idea was you got a program for the PC which became a sort of I/O
server. I *think* they drove the video directly (assuming the video
controller to be on VLB too) - so you may have to find a supported
board; but the host processor ran the disk, keyboard, mouse etc. It
will be interesting to see whether you get the NT software; if you do
it should have all the host stuff.
Good luck
Dominic Sweetman
dom@algor.co.uk
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