Synth Programmer

[Magnus Danielson]

>      Actually Magnus the 68302 has *three* serial ports! Remember the 68000 
>      is a family of chips, and embedded applications is all the rage these 
>      days. I recently finished complete hardware design of a 68302-based 
>      general purpose microcontroller card (plus Ethernet!) for one of our 
>      boxes here at work. Thus I am quite interested to see these posts fly 
>      back and forth - I hope that I can have something useful to add...

AIGH! You caugth me with my pants down....

But really, I must admitt that I haven't looked at the full 68k familly for
some time, even if I know of the exsitens of the 68302 but doesn't have the
details up in the back of my head...

Personally I think we could pick almost any of the CPUs available througth this
page:

http://www.it.kth.se/~e93_mda/electronics/logic/cpu/

Althougth some of them can be a bit tricky to make a card for (1 GHz is a high
busspeed indeed :).

The 68302 (or any other member out of the 68k familly) migth be a good pick.
[Just got first page of a 480 page PDF on the 68302 up... thank you Motorola!]

Looks like a really hand chip... price info please?

>      Here at work we also have 8032/8051/80%$#% stuff plus compilers out 
>      the wazoo. I'd hesitate to try the 68000 stuff (as I currently know 
>      it) at home, because we're Sun-based here. However I am restricted in 
>      my vision by my environment - others may know of an easier way to 
>      create Motorola code at home. Unfortunately I've been such a 
>      hardware-head for the last couple years that I know very little about 
>      developing uC code. Even on this last project, I created the hardware 
>      but typed not a word of program. Maybe I'll poke around a little....

I'd recommend that you look at the GAS/GCC stuff from GNU which you may find
at prep.ai.mit.edu in pub/gnu useing anonymous FTP. You are primarily 
interested
in the binutils- and gcc- files. The 68k backend of GCC is said to be very good
indeed when you let it go wild on optimations... I have personally used gcc
for cross compling MACH 3.0 with applications over to a 68020 based 
experimental
router with 2 ethernet interfaces and wirewrap area... you could hook a radio
to one of the ethernets and use it for cable/radio routeing...

If we go with Juergens line of just building a small CV storage thingie with
32 channels and about 64 patches I would personally hand code the thing in
virtually any processor being proposed.... anyone want PDP-11 code?

Personally I will be looking beyond the CV storage thing cause I have other
goals as well...

Magnus