A Lisa Inside An FPGA

[AlexTheCat123]

Yeah, maybe resubmit just so I don't miss you!

[Edge Connector]

So very excited by this thanks so much for this wonderful project!

[AlexTheCat123]

Time for an update on my progress with the boards!

Testing them has been a slow and tedious process combined with all the other stuff that I have to do, but I've confirmed that 46 of the 50 are functional. The other 4 are broken, and all the problems seem to be traced back to shorts in the soldering underneath the FPGA's BGA. I'm talking with JLC right now to arrange a solution (probably refund, rework, or remanufacturing) for those; I don't have the skill to solder BGAs myself!

Out of the other 46, I was only able to get 24 of them fully working because only 24 of the 50 SCCs that I ordered were real. The other 26 were fakes that were completely inert, partially worked but crashed the system sometimes, or were so fake that they prevented the system from even displaying an image on the screen. The seller is going to refund me for the defective ones, but I can't take the risk of ordering more and having them be fakes again, and that also sets the timeline for the boards back by at least another month. So I decided to finally bite the bullet and try to implement the SCC inside the FPGA. I planned ahead and the board already has facilities for disabling the real SCC and putting the FPGA into its place, so it was "simply" a matter of writing the SCC core.

But luckily, I didn't even have to do that! It turns out that a LisaList2 member has been working on an SCC core, and he very kindly PM'ed it to me a couple days ago. The first version I tried had a few bugs, but the version I'm on now seems rock-solid in everything that I've tried so far. So hopefully I'll have a fully tested and working solution here in a few days, and then I can remove the physical SCCs from all the boards and reprogram all 46 of them with the new bitstream. Thank you to the creator of the core once again!

At that point, it shouldn't be too long before I have them shipped out to MacEffects and JCM for resale to anybody who wants one! I'll probably make the GitHub repo public at around this same time, because that's when everything should be finalized for the initial release. The final quantity that'll go on sale is looking to be 41 right now, because I'm keeping two for myself and giving three more to three friends who have been very supportive of me and the entire project from the very beginning, before anyone else even knew about it. Future batches will have the full quantity on sale though!