Thanks for the follow!

Welcome! Eager to learn more about your Backbone Bus project! With my RM project I've sought to design the modules to be backplane-friendly.

Apologies for the late response.  :)  I was inspired by the RC2014 home-brew computer when I came up with the Backbone bus idea.  Instead of exposing the Z80 processor bus in a 40-pin SIP form factor, though, I decided I wanted to investigate exposing the Wishbone B.3 (or, more practically, B.4 classic) to the external world.  That way, it would be processor agnostic, the specifications completely out in the open, and it'd let me build a "processor module", a "video module", etc. all separately and sell them as kits to help augment my existing income, kind of replicating the basic success of the RC2014, but for a more modern (in the sense that it targets the 90s user experience instead of the 80s) architecture.

I never got very far with it.  There are several deficiencies which I'm not happy with.  I made a few printed circuit boards; and somewhere I have DIN 41612 connectors to populate it with, but since the bus is non-terminated, I doubt it will work at any speed above 4MHz to 8MHz, which is severely limiting.  I have zero experience building a backplane, and I have zero equipment (custom or otherwise) to test it with.  The other thing that bothers me about it is that it's very tightly coupled to a specific clock speed and bus width.  I don't know how to work around these problems, so for now Backbone is basically moribund.

I'm not sure what I'd do to restart this project in any way that makes sense to others.  Every work-around I come up with basically re-invents the 3.3V PCI standard.  :/

Pretty impressive! I'm loving how you're using legacy components where possible. So many more lessons that can be learned as one builds. I still have a lot to learn...

thank you for following my project Retro futuristic automobile control panel

I hope I will get it running again.

Thanks for the follow buddy!

Love your Retro Modules project!

:-)

You're very welcome! Yeah I was attempting to update my display name without altering any SEO-friendly URLs. I found some odd behavior there & changed it back to the previous setting. New (and great) site...

Thank you for so much for following! I appreciated your comments during the prize channel collaboratorium. Was I the only one who noticed you changed your name right in the middle of the meetup?