Hello NeXT Community:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW4SOxpXdoQ So the FUN idea add Color to your Cube ! I have a bunch of NeXTstation Color Motherboards with no Colorstation case all in excellent condition. Lets put them to use... 68040 25Mhz 32Mb of ram max... so The motherboard is a good start .... and it fits with in the existing guide rails out sticks out an inch, not the same foot print. The thought is a poormans Cube Color Motherboard upgrade kit as everyone asks how do I do color. Dimension boards are rare this might be a viable alternative ..
Thoughts? I also have new old stock power supplies but they get hot FAST and I think it would damage the boards unless we can cool them down or create a molex 4 pin to 96 pin adaptor ..... engineers needed lol ... as I say just thought of it.
I wish we had a bit more FPGA expertise. I wonder if we couldnt just duplicate the entire NeXTdimension. And maybe even finish some of its design like the C'cubed compression chip.
Same thing with doing an FPGA that encapsulates the entire pizza box mother board here.
Quote from: zombie on January 26, 2024, 08:14:18 PMI wonder if we couldnt just duplicate the entire NeXTdimension.
I think we have some information on the protocol between 68k NeXTstep and the Mach kernel running on the Dimension's i860. This would enable us to build a new color graphics card which does not require a replica of the i860 on an FPGA but uses some other modern CPU instead - as long as there is no code uploaded to the Dimension card at runtime...
A guy called mnmnt developed an Amiga rtg graphics card on a zinq fpga and it's superb. Worth chatting to him for pointers?
https://mntre.com/media/ZZ9000_info_md/2019-08-09-ZZ9000-resources.html
Quote from: cuby on January 27, 2024, 12:39:03 PMI think we have some information on the protocol between 68k NeXTstep and the Mach kernel running on the Dimension's i860. This would enable us to build a new color graphics card which does not require a replica of the i860 on an FPGA but uses some other modern CPU instead - as long as there is no code uploaded to the Dimension card at runtime...
I could be mistake, but I do believe there was code loaded up to the i860 processor. I think that the next dimension ran its own display postscript server for one.
Quote from: zombie on January 27, 2024, 06:07:35 PMI could be mistake, but I do believe there was code loaded up to the i860 processor. I think that the next dimension ran its own display postscript server for one.
That's correct - has it's own kernel etc. That said, the protocol could probably still be emulated. I would like to build a breakout board for a cube... design a PCB etc. so we could try this kind of experiment.