A rambling thought or two:
ISA cards provide a lot of the missing functions we're talking about for older machines. ISA is a fairly simple bus to interface with as I understand it, especially if you're not dealing with multiple cards. 8 bit ISA has been interfaced with PIC microcontrollers to provide NICs, sound cards, IDE, etc
So how about a PDS-ISA adapter?
Or a universal card:
* Or FreeDOS, whatever. The expander runs as a headless DOS computer just to support the ISA card and pass data back to the Mac. This being just one implementation. The CPU, software and pin mappings can all be changed in a flash, giving you a whole new card.
ISA cards provide a lot of the missing functions we're talking about for older machines. ISA is a fairly simple bus to interface with as I understand it, especially if you're not dealing with multiple cards. 8 bit ISA has been interfaced with PIC microcontrollers to provide NICs, sound cards, IDE, etc
So how about a PDS-ISA adapter?
Or a universal card:
- FPGA on a card with:
- Clip-on socket headers for:
- 030 PDS, '040 PDS, LC PDS, Nubus, ISA, DDR RAM, 68k/G3/x86 CPU etc, etc in either direction
- Re-programming the FPGA allows:
- Software pin remapping of all connectors
- 68k or other softcore CPU runs A/ROSE or:
- 8088/x86 running DOS * for driver support
* Or FreeDOS, whatever. The expander runs as a headless DOS computer just to support the ISA card and pass data back to the Mac. This being just one implementation. The CPU, software and pin mappings can all be changed in a flash, giving you a whole new card.