Memory man or similar

[Stopp,Gene]

Yeah I did some checking too, but I need to do more. Apparently there is
a cost-cut version of the programmer pod that hangs off of the serial
port. The one I used to use had a proprietary ISA bus card for the PC
with a ribbon cable to the pod, with interchangeable sockets for the
different IC packages. Also, the software (schematic capture and
VHDL/AHDL compiler) needs a dongle on the serial port to prevent
multiple software copy efforts. I need to get friendly with our Altera
rep. Such things are not impossible to get for free - one time I got a
Crystal AES/EBU stereo DAC eval board for free and it now sits in a box
providing two more outputs for my sampler :)

The chips are another problem - the MAX7000 series are reprogrammable
and expensive. There is another family that are one-time programmable,
for a lot less. I would imagine that the thing to do would be to use a
couple reprogrammable parts for development and the cheaper ones once
the design is verified.

A DIY'er could invest in such a system and then crank out chips as
projects for sale. This would help recoup the costs.

 - Gene

 ------
From: Hugo Haesaert
To: 'synth-diy mail list'; Stopp,Gene
Subject: Re: Memory man or similar
Date: Friday, February 27, 1998 2:00AM

Hi Gene and List !

I've been checking the Altera site lately and they have an evaluation
(limited) version of Max+Plus II usable for six months for free .  You
need to register etc ... Somewhere on their site i found a price of
usd995 for the _base_ full version in a press release with url :

http://www.altera.com/html/new/pressrel/pr_hdlfree.html

this seems like the bottom line, and so, not very affordable :-((((
Most, if not all, of these development systems (Xilinx, Lattice for
sure) are not priced any lower if not much higher .  Developing with
the latest ic's (read biggest, best, most interesting, promising,
etc...) is out for the DIYer 8-(((((

That usd1000 is apparently used a lot for dev systems, so i wonder if
it really reflects the cost of putting it out ?  I thought, naively
perhaps ;) that these companies were in it to sell ic's .  So ?

Won't help a lot, i'm afraid .

But keep em oscillating :)

Hugo