[Coco] A year in review at Cloud-9

Wed May 7 10:08:29 EDT 2014

I was asked by an individual who was at the fest for some reason didn't get a chance to meet or go over what I have been up to. :( The fest is a busy place for me and time flies by... :(

So in a response to him, I thought it would be a good time to update the list here.

I don't really have a press release and short on time but will try and cover the high points.

miniFLASH
 - Four 16K FLASH selectable boot/ROMs hardware or software selectable. 
Boards ready to go to the board house. Will do a prototype run before a 
production run. This is the same design as resides on the SuperIDE, different form factor, i na mini ROM pak case.

DOS
 Adapter - Ran out of the current non masked boards, these boards will 
now go to production masked, so they will have the solder mask and green
 color with white silkscreen on the next release. These boards are done 
and ready to go to the production board house.

PS2 Keyboard adapter - Current doing a Rev C board spin. This design will 
just have the Cloud-9 cross point switch(CPS) CPLD on it and not the 
Harris / RCA CPS. The board will be prototype, then go to the production board house. All firmware is completed for the is project. Currently in board layout.

SuperSD - Working on the CPLD logic to have an SD interface with a RTC(DS1307), USB COM port(parallel FIFOs) so no serial baud rate limit, will run at 
fully bus speed of the embedded AVR Xmega uC, 32K ROM emulator and 64K 
of on board high speed SRAM(15nS) access time. There will also be an expansion slot for the Wiznet platform.

The SuperSD supports the FAT file system(FS) to/from the AVR. The protocol 
to the AVR is DriveWire. This always forward driver development to be 
the same on the CoCo side and actual drivers to talk to SD or whatever 
devices are contained in the AVR's firmware space. The CoCo doesn't care what the FS is 
and is totally transparent. All the CoCo wants and cares about is data. 
This interface is not a serial interface to the CoCo. It is a parallel 
interface much like the Becker port. All the handshaking is 
automatically handled by the AVR as it knows when the CoCo reads/writes 
to the port. A status port check is only needed to initiate the first 
data byte, after that the CoCo will then read X number data bytes the 
fastest way possible. Yes we have researched and found the fastest 
combination under NOS, thus the fast megaread times(see bleow).

The SuperSD's ROM emulator will load the ROM file as configured by a configuration read by the AVR Xmega at RESET. The ROM file will be on the SD in a directory named ROMs. 32K max size supported.This file will be placed in to the CoCo's address space before the CoCo 
boots. Initial testing has shown that a 8K boot rom can load in ~24mS. 
So you won't even notice the load time, you will think you are running 
from a EPROM. :) Change the configuration file, reset and running a 
different ROM. I haven't written a ROM file manager GUI but would be 
very simple to do, just no time ATM.

The embedded uC is an Atmel AVR Xmega 128a1 version and is running at 32MHZ with a 16MHZ SPI bus, full DMA support on chip and a TON of other cool and plentiful resources. Currently we are looking at the fastest 
interface for the CoCo ever to be design. Preliminary megaread(MR) 
baselines should be in the 7-9 second region. Prior to this the TC^3 was the fastest at 11-13seconds MR times with a VERY fast drive. The SuperIDE came in around 19seconds. The AVR can read a meg in under 1.8seconds, the rest is NOS overhead.

The Wiznet port is for my development and future expansion. I have spent the past year writing firmware for this platform on the AVR to support almost every common functions. 
FTP is not done yet, some point will be but just a busy work app that 
needs to be written. I currently have all the code debugged and 
operational on the Ardunio Mega2560 platform.Coding to these protocols 
are done by reading RFCs and coding to them. Absolutely huge task but 
cool stuff for sure.

The SuperSD will also has an AES encryption engine. I wrote an AES 128bit 
encrypted bootloader that reads the file from the SD. This is written is assembly language on the AVR and it is read only and fast. Read only was a requirement as it was hard to get it all to fit in the bootloader space of the AVR. This function was very important as I can now distribute firmware updates on the website.

For all those that are going to ask, yes these functions reside on the SuperBoard and will be ending shortly. As this technology directly transfers to it and was the basis of why it was developed. No one wants this board done more than I. Boisy might think he does, but I am current doing all the development, software and hardware. He has offered his support to wrap this up and I will be taking him up on the finer internal workings of NOS. Internal CPLD developed and board layout will start later this year. 2015 CoCoFest, this board WILL be completed, unless I have a health issue, which short of sleep I am fine..... :)

I could talk all day about the development over the past year, this is 
just the highlights. So for anyone that thinks I am just sitting around 
not doing any development..........  A snapshot in to my world. :)

Happy CoCoing!!!!!!

Regards,

Mark
http://www.cloud9tech.com