> [...]
> I'm not opposed to an ISA expansion bus. Design is an art of
> compromise and trade-offs. If there is room on the board and in the
> budget for an expansion bus, that's great. But if most of the
> _function_ of the expansion bus can be accomodated by this 100-pin
> quad flat pack and a 22V10 and a bus buffer, then it's not
> _such_a_disaster_ if there's not room for the expansion bus, or
> perhaps only one expansion socket.
I did *not* made the suggestion to use that Super I/O thing because
I like to skip the ISA bus. I suggested it because we *definitly*
need UARTS, and we have some good reasons (floppy boot) to have a FDC
on board. Well, that chip has additional parallel and IDE interfaces.
That's nice. Nothing more.
> I'm trying to imagine who are the people who are going to use this
> thing, and how are they going to use it. My _guess_ is that the
> people who want to do data acquisition will use a commercial PC, and
> probably commercial software, for that. On the other hand, various
> sound cards or MIDI interfaces are probably something that would
> interest the second wave of 'riscy owners' (the pioneers will be
> pleased to get the thing to send and receive mail).
Yes, sending mail is even for me more important than MIDI, but,
you won't believe it, that thing has *free* programmable baud rates
from XX to 115k. Baudrate is set by a 16bit timer for each UART,
so even the MIDI baudrate shouldn't be a problem. You just have to
add the opto-isolators!
Andy
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