Re: ROM Dump of Amiga Keyboard controller

From: silverdr_at_wfmh.org.pl
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2014 20:19:00 +0200
Message-ID: <etPan.53cd5994.625558ec.5917@szaman.lan>
> > Now that we have the ROM of the 6500/1 in the VC-1520 dumped,
> > disassembled and analyzed, shouldn't it be 'relatively' easy (*) to
> > build a 100% compatible replacement using one of the Atmel Atmega with
> > enough I/O pins? The Atmega16 comes to mind here. 16 KB flash and 1 KB
> > RAM should be more than enough. The pinout is different, but that
> > would be a purely mechanical problem.
> >
> > (*) for people who know that controller well enough

> I am sure it's not a huge challenge, but what other cool features should
> the 1520 have :-) That would seem to be a question worth considering?
>  
> More chars in the font?
> Different font?
> Some more functions like primitives for box, circle, etc.?
>  
> Dunno, just wondering.

For me it is already worth to have an easily available replacement any time. And not only for the 1520 but for other devices that use some variants. True - in 1520 -  most probably 97.8% of the failures is the mechanism, with all electronics combined occupying the remaining slot. But I remember replacing the Amiga keyboard controllers many times.

Of course some non-us-ascii characters might be worth something for some other people. Although they can be "emulated" - I needed and did this back in the days.

The coolest (but not the most efficient) to me would be to put a 6502 emulator inside the modern chip and feed it with unchanged (or changed at the 6502 level) firmware. That's more of a challenge, isn't it? :-) The advantage would be that with single challenge successfully finished all devices could have a direct replacement when needed!

--  
SD!

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Received on 2014-07-21 19:01:03

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