exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Feels like I been at it a million years

Its about 95% routed now. The main issue really is the control lines from GLUE to every other chip because loads of signals need to route right across the board, which isn't simple as I already have multiple crossing signals on 3 layers already, so there's no room left . In hindsight the GLUE might have been better going near the ACIA's . Though it begs the question is my very first original route ( https://www.exxosforum.co.uk/forum/viewt ... 7&t=14#p41) where the chips were at the bottom of the board with a common bus, might actually be better *if* it could be squashed down a lot more.

29 unroutet airwires hanging off the bus..
29 unroutet airwires hanging off the bus..
and if one green airwire should accidentally on purpose get routed...
There be 28 unroutet airwires hanging off the bus..

Wasn't me

The alt-ram boards are finally on order..

I tried to get JLC to make them, but they claim its all "out of spec" and talking to them about issues is a uphill battle, even more so since Icky sent them a H4 for review 2 weeks ago and they not replied.

So I have passed it over to my regular PCB guy who says no problem to make them, though unfortunately they end up 4x the price of JLC. Though you get the service you pay for I guess.


These do not have the PLD control chip on them. This current board is designed to stack onto flashy-clock to drive it. Though as this RAM board is "stand alone" it will eventually find its way onto the 50MHz SEC booster board so we can have full speed 50MHz access to "fast-ram".

Once I have a working alt-ram board, I can finally start adding proper benchmarks to GB6 as currently the alt-ram tests are not actually calibrated.

More Eagle oddities..

Take the yellow track.. it goes from the SMT chip on the left, top layer, then jumpers over the blue tracks, then jumps back to the top layer again


When it could have just gone right across the board on just the top layer..


Anywhos, the last few tracks are tricky as a lot of GLUE control lines to route right across the board.

and it's done

Let's never ever manually route a motherboard again!


Got a whole load of tidying up and DRC stuff to do, but hopefully I can get this finished before the weekend

exxos wrote: ↑Thu Oct 24, 2019 4:43 pm Let's never ever manually route a motherboard again!

Famous last words

Great work.

I dare you to design the next board with the chips set radially around the GLUE and with circular data and address buses.

All this linearity is so passé.

stephen_usher wrote: ↑Thu Oct 24, 2019 6:38 pm I dare you to design the next board with the chips set radially around the GLUE and with circular data and address buses.

All this linearity is so passé.

We already have curves