[Coco] Superboard discussion: Serial EEPROM

[Mark Marlette]

At 09:57 AM 5/3/2004 -0500, you wrote:

Darn software guys...... The "SuperBoard Rev 1.0 (Serial #0001)" would be 
nice but it would require a different .pof file for each SuperBoard and 
chew up a ton of the CPLD. Not something I would want to maintain.

We could VERY easily add a register that would be a byte or two wide that 
could handle configuration, options data and SB presence info.

Mark
Cloud-9


>On May 3, 2004, at 9:40 AM, Bob wrote:
>>Agreed.
>>
>>So, next question, and possibly one for a new sub-topic... how does a 3rd 
>>party
>>program detect the Superboard? and the installed options? Perhaps another 
>>byte
>>in the EEPROM with a bit for each option (would the unused 2 bits be
>>enough?)... just thinking out loud.
>
>Probably the easiest and most sure-fired way to detect the presence of the 
>SuperBoard would be to reserve an address in the $FF1X or $FF3X region 
>which when POKEd, would return data about the board.  For instance:
>
>POKE &HFF3F,0
>?PEEK(&HFF3F)
>
>Would return 'S'.  Then...
>
>POKE &HFF3F,1
>?PEEK(&HFF3F)
>
>Would return 'u'....
>
>And so on and so forth.  The value POKEd into $FF3F would correspond to 
>the position in the string where the character would be returned on the 
>next read.  We could also embed serial number information this way.  So a 
>maximum of 256 characters could be stored this way.  Such a string could be:
>
>SuperBoard Rev 1.0 (Serial #0001)
>
>Of course, when POKING and PEEKING on a non SuperBoard CoCo 3, you would 
>likely NOT get an S, u, etc...  so you could immediately detect the 
>presence of a SuperBoard.
>
>
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