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The 030 cycle counts are far from perfect. I don't think "div" has ever been closely studied there (it has for the original 68000, but that it), and even for the simple instructions I had to hack a cycle count to make the next timing test pass. We have problems there, the cache, and maybe even the 010 loop mode, being probably a part of them.

OG.

Ok, thanks, as I suspected that and it also means that we will not pass these tests and choose the right board profile for the asic right now, unless I do some board driver trickery with the PIT clock etc, so we can start the firmware correctly.

The firmware also seem to support different memory maps based on different table lookups, with some jumper settings I get to poll loops that doesn't match the assumed CPU-30 memory map. Some others I get a terminal but so far I have not got the right banner and board speed.

I start filling in the blanks in the FGA-002 for the CPU-30 now since I think there is a CPU-40 firmware coming in soon.

Some progress at last, but more out of luck, setting the jumpers "randomly" (not really) finally booted up the CPU-33 firmware, guess I have to tweak the driver to reflect that board now, and I can trace how a good table lookup looks like. Eyring Research indicates that a PDOS RTOS kernel is available as expected. :-)

Nice!

I'm genuinely curious, what sorts of things were these boards typically used for? Industrial automation and control for things that needed more horsepower than a simple PLC, or what? It's very cool to see these weird, obscure things getting emulated!

Tons of things used them, instruments, lab experiments, radio telescopes, :-)

The main source for information on these boards nowadays are laboratories that have stuff running (still) that they're trying to support.

There are bunches of boards on eBay, mostly with insane prices because of the market for spares to keep this equipment alive.

It was a supported upgrade for VME Sun2s to swap the CPU board for a Sun3 and later a Sun4. This is why a lot of older VME cards from Sun were supported in the boot PROMs all the way through the SPARC machines. It's also why the ID PROM stayed pin-compatible all that time; you were meant to carry your old ID PROM forward when you upgraded so your MAC address and machine ID stayed the same and copy-protected software was happy. That finally ended with sun4c and SBus.

Wiki says the Atari TT's system bus was VME but it apparently wasn't brought out to any VME-compatible connectors.

In the embedded world these systems were on the border land between UNIX and RTOS long before Linux came along and blurred the view. In a VME chassi you typically had a few to loads of deterministic data gathering boards which were aggregating data to a main CPU which also could act on the data and control the machinery through other VME interface boards. The main CPU typically ran a user interface under OS9/UNIX or somethings else, later both Sun and Microsoft (and even Apple right?) tried to own that main CPU board. Sometimes the data was just passed on to a "normal" computer or a PC over ethernet, or to another VME chassi for further processing. These could be huge systems or just a single VME board.

A typical system suitable for VME boards were usually very complex or in too small series to develop a custom board/system. While VME was expensive it still did cut out quite some development costs. VME projects I have been working with as a supplier as far as I remember includes:

- Drill robot for mines with 3D vector projections
- Robot control prototypes
- High sea (waves) compensation system for Hydrofoil boats
- Accellerator rings
- Test equipment for the Arianne rockets
- Sawmills
- Automated manufacturing
- Telephone exchange systems

Sometimes the systems were used for development prototyping only but sometimes they just kept buying crates which was great of course. My part was to among others to write drivers bundled in so called BSP:s for the boards supporting the particular RTOS/OS the customer were using, in our case mostly VRTX and VxWorks. Lots of fun

Here are some pictures of the fantastic Heurikon posters that I used to decorate our office back then: http://www.briandonahoe.com/PhotoAlbum/Heurikon/index.html

Those are awesome