On Tue, 24 Jul 2001, Steve Judd wrote: > Just kidding... Well, I could announce some hardware I'm working on. The Vic-20 RAM/ROM cartridge is still unfinished, but the good news are that a friend of mine is able to assemble some prototypes. It's no easy task, since the pins of the Flash ROM and of the logic array are at a 350 micrometer grid. The prototype boards have no solder-resisting mask, it's just plain copper. I hope that we get the first prototype working by the end of the year (initially I thought it would be during April or May). A related note: there's a cheap PCB manufacturing shop in Bulgaria, reachable via http://run.to/pcb or http://www.olimex.com/pcb.html. They should be able to manufacture two-sided boards at 200 micrometer resolution (0.2 mm line widths and gaps), directly from Eagle files. The light edition of Eagle is free for non-profit use, and it is available not only for Windows, but also for Linux, from Cadsoft's home page. The second piece of hardware I'm working on is a device that plugs into the cassette port. It features an Atmel AT90S2313 microcontroller (128 bytes of RAM and 2kB of ROM) running at 4 MHz and a MAX232 line driver. This device will both emulate the tape protocol and implement a custom protocol for faster file transfers between an RS-232 equipped computer and any 8-bit Commodore computer. It fits on a single-sided circuit board with no jumper wires (well, two are required for the CTS and RTS signals on the DB9 connector). Marko
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