Man.
Everything you're saying is sensible, and that really bums me out. I suppose bare microprocessors don't really make sense for manufacturers to make anymore. Like you said, using a SoC isn't really building a system "from scratch," but it's all I had to work with if I wanted to use a modern CPU. But again, like you said, all the interesting peripherals chips now are SPI and I2C anyway. Higher bandwidth stuff gets integrated into the microcontroller, so you don't really see much in the way of parallel devices anymore.
But... Just to defend my idea for one last moment... I don't think a fast bus is necessarily impractical for a hobbyist system. My plan was to use a couple universal bus transceivers on a card with a prototyping area, so you'd have a 32 pin IO port along with the other signals each card gets (the noteworthy ones being I2C and an interrupt line). That would give you a nice and safe way to talk to the CPU with just about any little bits of hardware you might plan to use, and the price would be very low (those chips are less than a dollar in quantity.)
Side note: My friends used to call me the "dream crusher" because I would bring harsh reality to their wild plans. So... I guess this is fair. Dream crusher.
:lol:
Everything you're saying is sensible, and that really bums me out. I suppose bare microprocessors don't really make sense for manufacturers to make anymore. Like you said, using a SoC isn't really building a system "from scratch," but it's all I had to work with if I wanted to use a modern CPU. But again, like you said, all the interesting peripherals chips now are SPI and I2C anyway. Higher bandwidth stuff gets integrated into the microcontroller, so you don't really see much in the way of parallel devices anymore.
But... Just to defend my idea for one last moment... I don't think a fast bus is necessarily impractical for a hobbyist system. My plan was to use a couple universal bus transceivers on a card with a prototyping area, so you'd have a 32 pin IO port along with the other signals each card gets (the noteworthy ones being I2C and an interrupt line). That would give you a nice and safe way to talk to the CPU with just about any little bits of hardware you might plan to use, and the price would be very low (those chips are less than a dollar in quantity.)
Side note: My friends used to call me the "dream crusher" because I would bring harsh reality to their wild plans. So... I guess this is fair. Dream crusher.
:lol: