Stefany has posted her latest update on the C256 Foenix Project.
Through Hell or High Water
In October, the project has been testing my determination. I have to admit that I never thought I would spend so much time in the bring up phase of that first board. My expectations were that by mid-October I would be already developing the 2D Graphics engine. As of today, I am nowhere close to that point. Actually, I have been struggling with a very subtle and nasty problem that I believe I found the source of. My hubris got the best of me during the design phase of the project. I completely overestimated the importance of applying the same rules for very fast clock circuit to the more modest one like 14Mhz. At the end of the day, noise is a problem that exists at every clock speed and it needs to be dealt with the same way, either it is a 200Mhz or a 14Mhz clock system. Lesson learned.
Time for Revision B
Now that I have pinpointed the specifics of my different problems/bugs that I found along the way and also after a very enlightening conversation with a friend of mine during Portland Retro gaming. I have decided to begin the process of creating a revision B that will encompass the different changes needed to fix my problems but also to go through a BOM cost reduction exercise. Which will leads me inexorably to reconsider many of my early choices hence to remove a lot of unnecessary parts and/or possible features that some of you might have wanted. I will give the details of the new set of features in the next update.
The person she’s referring to is David Murray aka The 8-Bit Guy. They have been talking about colaborating or him possibly using a scaled down version of the C256 Foenix board. I’m sure there will be more to come on that soon.
