STLabs

TTRAMIDE CARD FEATURES

Xilinx XC95XX CPLD acting as memory and IDE control unit.

EDO RAM controller with two slots supporting 2*4MB, 2*8MB, 2*16MB or 2*32MB Micron Technologies compatible 72-pins SIMM modules.

ATA-IDE interface with up to two devices, HDDRIVER and ATARI compatible*

* with a mint 3.06 TOS, the IDE drive shall only be recognized AFTER a bootable SCSI drive.

In order to directly boot in IDE mode, I made a small patch for the TOS which requires one of the four EEPROMS to be reflashed. In that case SCSI drives are not direclty bootable but require an IDE drive to be present first (or a boot floppy with HDDRIVER). Cecile is not yet checked.

the card form factor makes it directly plugable in the TT but requires three wires to be soldered to the mainboard (not signal cut) :

1. one signal needed to acknowledge the IDE drive interrupts (DMA IRQ).

2. the second needed to acknowledge 16-bits transfers to the CPU (very easy on TTs with 16 to 32MHz add-on cpu card, but not tested on TTs with mint 32MHz cpus).
3. the third is the 32MHz master clock

- Burst mode and speed : done 2007/09
- Support 4 to 64MB modules : ongoing.

After months of unsuccessful fight for the design to work, It appeared that the origin of the problems laid in the 32MHz daughter board of the TT030 itself. So after having changed it I managed to reach the full burst mode performance!

I then had the choice to stick to a 16Mhz main clock as provided by the Atari connector or to directly pick up the system 32 MHz clock, which I did. As a consequence, I got a 30% improvement over the original Atari TTRAM card.

WRITE
MULTIREAD
MULTIWRITE

MEMOREAD
MEMOWRITE
BLOCKMOVE
BITSHIFT
MULDIV
OVERLAP
RAWPOWER
VIDEOREAD
VIDEOWRITE

MEMOREAD FASTRAM
MEMOWRITE FASTRAM

TTRAM2CPU
CPU2TTRAM
TTRAM2TTRAM

14.2 MB/s
12.2 MB/s
7.1 MB/s

18.6 MB/s (+31%)
15.3 MB/s (+25%)
9.3 MB/s (+31%)