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Normally, JLCPCB needs the gerber files (to make the PCB), a BOM (bill of material, the list of components you need), and a placement file (so the pick-and-place machine places the components in the right place for soldering). In my repo, the required files for the PCB should be in IIci_ATX.zip...

At the time (Feb'23), the command history says $24.75 for 5 populated boards, including custom/duties to France. No memory how that translated into euros at the time. Yes, they did all the SMD stuff (passives, the gate, the small switch), I bought the actual connectors for both sides from...

Adapter: depending on where you live, might be faster/cheaper to just make your own. My version is here; other people have rolled out different solutions. Mine is mostly SMD (had them done by JLCPCB), I soldered the two connectors by hand (There's a picture). It has a power-good led and a small...

First, my bad, should have written "68000" in the paragraph you answer to, not "68k". Though my point (you need contiguous memory at the hardware level) also apply to fully MMU-less 68020 (from the '030 onward, the MMU is used). As for the LC and LCII, the easiest way it to quote Apple's...

Pretty sure it's not the case for the 68k based systems. Non-contiguous addresses visible from software is a massive pain (as all those who tried to increase the amount of memory in those old systems quickly find out). Much easier to make memory contiguous in hardware. ... so the memory *is*...

IIRC, RAM Doubler required a MMU. You can do a lot more magic when you have a MMU :-)

The Plus (and all those using 68000, plus the MMU-less II and the original LC) don't deal with non-contiguous memory very well because they expose the physical address of the hardware directly to the software. In theory, you could use discontinuous area for RAM, but allocating and deallocating...

Not quite the same use case, but might be helpful anyway: I never found pins to expand a socket on the usual sites, but I did find some on AliExpress. I was looking to convert a '040 PGA socket (available on Mouser) from regular to V (they have another 3 pins, the socket is unobtainium). A...

Not in the OS Open Firmware is designed to be embedded in the machine itself (in ROM, Flash, whatever) to initialize the machine hardware and then be able to boot it into an operating system - it runs before the OS. Some (most) of that stuff is in actual binary machine code (PowerPC for Apple...

It's an open standard for a boot system, namely IEEE 1275. It was originally developed by Sun as OpenBoot for their own systems when they introduced SPARC (as a replacement for the 68k used in previous systems). It has nothing to do with PCI originally, as the first systems with OpenBoot were...

Just to avoid searching for the wrong thing: the IMS G300 isn't a transputer, it's a "Color Video Controller" (read: video DAC) and would have made a high-resolution device (max 1280x1024 for some). It was made (designed, rather) by INMOS, and manufacturd by SGS Thomson. So don't expect...

Still the best reference. The thing to understand - and that is far from obvious - is that pipelining is expensive in area. Whenever a pipeline stage is cut in half to boost frequency, it means that all signals have to be registered in the middle (the value of the signal has to be captured into...

I'll don my firesuit and say it out loud: the performance of Alpha is largely an urban legend. In real life, it wasn't that much better than everything else available in a similar time-frame. I think this the belief exists for two main reasons: (a) the megahertz myth that was running at full...

If you want some more readable cint92 data, here's the netlib content filtered into a ODS spreadsheet.

I'm fiarly sure the QL didn't have an MMU, Ethernet, or SCSI, let alone DMA for the last two. And the 8-bit bus is a lot easier to handle than the wider bus of other 68k (the number of buffer and register chips in the 3/60 is staggering, as with bus sizing on a '020 you need to move that upper...

I think here you're comparing different things, and over-estimate the importance of laptops at the time. As you note later, the 68k was originally high-end. TL;DR: early 68k needed extra chips to be at feature-parity with later one, and laptops never use the highest-end CPUs. The original...

As you noted later in your post, it's connecting a FPGA to a '110. Re-creating a '110 would be even more complex than recreating a full '030, and we still don't have that as open-source gateware :-( The original idea was to create a FPGA-based motherboard with a CPU daughtercard (or two), and...

The Vcc and GND pins don't really count as signals, in the PGA package they are through-hole so they connect directly to the power and ground planes - not routing needed. You do need to decouple them properly, though. Not much of a problem on a dual-sided board, but if you want a cheaper...

I believe so, because if you ignore the direct-store interface, the 60x bus is similar to the 88110 bus (the original 88100 is quite different as it has split instruction and data busses and pretty much need a pair of 88200 to make a conventional workstation). There's some differences between...

Probably, but not certain, because of the direct-store (which the 601 had a different name for) interface. The 60x bus is more complex than a 68k bus, but not by an unreasonable amount. The main differences are (a) 64 bits (obvious!) (b) separate bus controls for Address and Data busses. (c)...