First Lot of Super Proto Boards on order

Posted on by

First, a little background.

About a month ago, Rich Dreher tipped me off to an EEPROM issue he had seen in the past when interfacing an EEPROM to the Apple II bus. Well I didn’t have any issues with my prototype unit, but decided to do some additional testing with different EEPROMs. Back in the lab this EEPROM testing got confused with a flakey motherboard issue and the whole thing set me back a month.

After moving to a different motherboard, I eventually figured out that ATMEL EEPROMs don’t play well with the Apple II address bus, just like Rich indicated. However, an alternate source, XICOR, makes EEPROMs that do seem to behave quite well, so I’m back on track. During initial bringup, I had done my original testing with XICOR, which is why I didn’t see the problem with ATMEL parts.

So besides checking out EEPROM behavior, I made some design tweaks, checked out bus timing, made sure interrupts work and so on. At this point everything looks good,so I just pulled the trigger on a small trial run of boards. With any luck I may even manage to get some sent out to those of you HW hackers that are visiting K-Fest.

I plan on completely documenting this board including the GAL online, so little to no printed documentation will be created. If I can figure out how to do it, I want to set up a wiki type documentation environment where prototypers can add their own designs and share their knowledge with everyone else.

Here is the top side layout:

Super Proto Rev 0

Super Proto Rev 0

The base feature set includes

  • Onboard 32K EEPROM – only 2K is normally addressable from Apple’s C800-CEFF and CX00-CXFF I/O space
  • EEPROM is programmable directly from the Apple II’s 6502.
  • Glue logic integrated in 22V10 GAL – replaces a number of 74LS glue chips that are commonly seen in designs like the super serial card and the mockingboard
  • Data bus fully buffered with 74LS245
  • PCB location for 6522A VIA, with no additional glue logic required
  • Two general purpose proto areas
  • Locations for more than 5 300 mill DIP chips of varying pin count
  • With 6522 VIA, room for an additional 40 pin dip package. This does cut into 300 mill DIP area. but it should be possible build a 3 channel Mockingboard on the super proto board.
  • Synthesized psuedo PH2 clock available – was required for 6522 inteface

    • The hope is that this board takes care of all the heavy lifting of interfacing to the Apple II bus and lets you focus on the the fun side of hardware hacking on the Apple II.

    Pricing hasn’t been set, but it will be well under $100 for a kit. Bare boards will also be available.

    Stay tuned.

    5 thoughts on “First Lot of Super Proto Boards on order”

    1. Hi Mike,

      I am interested by your card, I already have a CFFA
      card from Rich DREHER.

      Me and my cousin an electronics technician and me
      a software programmer are interested to create cards
      for Apple][e in very little quantity. Have you got some
      Apple ][ card schematics for beginners ? Could you
      send me PDF files or a web link to read some schematics ?

      Thank you for an answer…

      Stephane PIRONNEAU
      FRANCE
      stephane.pironneau@free.fr

    3. Pingback: Open Apple #17 (July 2012): Rich Dreher, Apple-1, Atari, and Robert Tripp | Open Apple

    4. Pingback: What's KansasFest without contests? | KansasFest

    5. Pingback: What's KansasFest without contests? | KansasFest | The Blog Contests Site

    Comments are closed.