Does anyone have suggestions or experience with probing the PDS bus while a card is present in the slot? I don't have a specific problem yet, but as my final round of schooling draws to a close, I really want to get back into making new things for my collection of vintage machines (SE/30 included). I have a few ideas for an expansion card, and I'm certain I'm going to need low level bus insight for some of the features.
There doesn't appear to be anything "out there" presently. My instinct is that one of those Cypress Parallel-USB3 chips with appropriate muxing and buffering will be easiest. It's still up to 1.6Gbps of data (average will be much less given most signals don't wiggle every cycle), but shipping the entire bus over USB 3 has distinct advantages beyond using something like Sigrok for logic analysis. Once can imagine snooping on the frame buffer like Rob Braun did a few years ago or preserve the entire contents of memory and start up a simulator from various points in the history.
Anyway, it's just an idea at this point. School still has a chokehold on my life, but I wanted to solicit ideas before I even started given that my intent here is to make a tool that will be useful.
There doesn't appear to be anything "out there" presently. My instinct is that one of those Cypress Parallel-USB3 chips with appropriate muxing and buffering will be easiest. It's still up to 1.6Gbps of data (average will be much less given most signals don't wiggle every cycle), but shipping the entire bus over USB 3 has distinct advantages beyond using something like Sigrok for logic analysis. Once can imagine snooping on the frame buffer like Rob Braun did a few years ago or preserve the entire contents of memory and start up a simulator from various points in the history.
Anyway, it's just an idea at this point. School still has a chokehold on my life, but I wanted to solicit ideas before I even started given that my intent here is to make a tool that will be useful.
