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Carte Blanche new batch of cards

inakito

inakito

Experienced Member
Joined
Oct 5, 2011
Messages
297
Location
Spain
Hi everybody.

This is just to announce (with a small delay of several years; sorry Steve) the *real* possibility to get a new batch of "Carte Blanche" boards (as designed and made by AppleLogic team).
A friend of mine, Plamen, is ready to run a new batch of boards. Price is not fixed at this time, because it would depend on how many people would be interested.
Boards would be professionaly made. Plamen sells currently other boards for AppleII as well as for other vintage platforms.

In case you are interested just let me know by leaving me a private message. For now I just want to know how many people would like to purchase one of these boards.

In case you do not know what a "Carte Blanche" is take a look at this page: http://www.applelogic.org/CarteBlanche.html

BTW, If you are one of the AppleLogic team members and want to say something, please do it!

inakito.
 
I've always thought of the CartBlanche as vaporware (other than the maybe 10 boards initially released), I've not seen a thing from that site in over 5 years, I figured the project was dead. I am interested to see what happens here, but I am not holding my breath, lol
 
A really cool project ... A REVIVAL!
Im very much interested to have one or two CB-250 and one CB-500. Expected prices would be nice ;-). I have much trouble to get a source for the expansion-connector. An expansion board that offers a 5V/3V/1.8V compatible prototyping area would be a cool thing as well.

I have a CB500 right now and will be very happy to buy two or three 'backup'-boards.

-Jonas
 
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RWallmow said:
I've always thought of the CartBlanche as vaporware (other than the maybe 10 boards initially released), I've not seen a thing from that site in over 5 years, I figured the project was dead. I am interested to see what happens here, but I am not holding my breath, lol
Click to expand...

It was 50 Boards in total.
35x CB250 and 15x CB500

I would agree to say that this is not much, but its not nothing. It would be really cool to have a wider audience and more developers. I would expect the most CB to sit on shelves all over the world catching dust. Anyways, the CB was designed to give developers a platform for their projects. The CB is not a consumer product!

-Jonas
 
Stynx, what's the difference between the 250 and the 500? I get there's a difference in number of gates, but practically, what does it really mean? Are there any old cards that wouldn't be able to be ported to 250 and would need 500?
 
Olivier said:
Stynx, what's the difference between the 250 and the 500? I get there's a difference in number of gates, but practically, what does it really mean? Are there any old cards that wouldn't be able to be ported to 250 and would need 500?
Click to expand...

The CB500 has more gates but is a little slower. You can synthesize a complete 6502 CPU with a bit of glue in the CB500 but not with the CB250. Both cards have more than enough gates to synthesize most of the Boards for the Apple II. But the CB250 might be in need of external logic to meet modern requirements (Accelerator, Graphics card, ...). The most limiting factor (for my projects) of the CB250 is the lower count of block-RAM in comparison to the CB500.

The biggest setback of the CB-board (in my opinion) is the limited amount of SRAM on the PCB itself. A 8mb SD-RAM chip would have made so much things much easier , at least for me ;-). A small high speed fpga (>200mhz) as companion to the 3S500E/3S250E would have been nice as well. The choice of the expansion connector is not perfect, as it will make expansion cards unnecessary hard to build. I can understand the design-choice to use these components but it makes everything so complicated ;-)

-Jonas
 
So far, only 5 forum members have shown some interest on the board. Not enough for a run of new boards am I afraid.
 
inakito said:
So far, only 5 forum members have shown some interest on the board. Not enough for a run of new boards am I afraid.
Click to expand...
Sad...

But you should be a lot more clear what you (or whoever) have offer...

- is it only the bare boards or completely assembled?
- CB250 or CB500?
- How long does the production take?
- who is producing the card?
- what is the expected price of a card?
- what are the actual production costs?
- how many cards are planned?
- how many cards have to be reserved/ordered to get the production going?

If you're just saying that you (or whoever) might offer some cards without any further info, you should not be surprised if only some people are 'interested'.

AND ... only this Forum might be not the best choice for this kind of question. I have posted the link to here on CSA2 and the people there said that they will not register in some 'random' Forum to post interest in the card. If you (or whoever) really want to produce the card, you should not limit yourself to one community and create a website (or some google-docs stuff) to get the interest you seek.

<just my 2 cents>

-Jonas
 
Fully assembled, CB250, 2 months, to be entirely produced on EU, less than 250 USD, less than 250 USD, 20/30 boards, 20/30 boards.

You know, this is my second try to produce a new batch of CB boards. I contacted Steve H., one of the original authors of CB, several years ago, and he was so kind to allow me to produce a new run of CB boards. It was very difficult to produce it a reasonable cost however. Main reason to not getting a large demand for this board is probably it is a very technical board. Probably not suitable for general public, but very interesting for more technical guys. Probably Altium-center design is not a plus either.

In order to retake the challenge, I contacted a friend of mine, in Bulgaria (I am Spanish), some months ago, who is an expert on the field, to produce the board entirely in the EU and he agreed. But we would need a minimum order volume to keep costs bellow some limits.

I know people do not want to order without having more precise data, but we need more 'potential' customers to offer reasonable costs.

You know, Steve and Alex, the authors of the original CB boards did a great effort providing the first run of CB boards. It is very difficult to keep costs bellow what people expecto to pay for, having a mere 50 boards to be produced.

inakito.
 
I don't think you are looking at this in the right way. How many semi-serious Apple II hardware developers do you think there are? My guess would be less than 50. Out of those how many can program in VDHL/Verilog or are willing/have the time to learn? Out of those how many have the hardware to program up a CB? Out of those how many already have a CB? I am not surprised you got so few responses even if you had requested this in a more popular Apple II forum. If you want to see cards in any cost effective number you should be thinking a long the lines of selling the card as a IIGS Accelerator card / A2 3.5 Disk Superdrive controller card / HDMI or VGA video card etc and having the card as a reprogrammable device being just a bonus. I think the first batch of CB cards were made out of a labour of love and in the hope that out of the 50 cards or so one or two developers could make the card into the killer app. I think many people are holding out to see what these cards are really capable of. Just me view of things.
 
lukazi said:
I don't think you are looking at this in the right way. How many semi-serious Apple II hardware developers do you think there are? My guess would be less than 50. Out of those how many can program in VDHL/Verilog or are willing/have the time to learn? Out of those how many have the hardware to program up a CB? Out of those how many already have a CB? ...
Click to expand...

I think that there are more than 100 people worldwide that would be interested to develop something with the CB. But they have to be reached and most of them don't even know the card exists! Since the CB offerers several functions already (if programmed correctly), there is a lot of potential.

But i see several design-flaws for myself with the CB.

First: there is the expansion connector. It limits any development to professional production. Any expanded experimentation with external components needs an Adapter for the Expansion connector.
Second: an IDE Interface is not needed on the CB. We have enough high quality Mass storage cards easily available. The should have been a 40pin 5VTTL compatible expansion connector (with GND and 5V).
Third: the card does not need to be that 'over engineered' with everything good-plated and extremely high quality PCB.

My biggest problem is the missing (40pin) 5VTTL interface. I have several ideas what the card can offer, but i need that 5VTTL-compatibility. There are CB-compatible Prototyping boards available. Altium uses the same connetor for the "nano board" series. I have bought 3 of them for 33€ each and thats a little much, if you want to tinker around...

Anyways, in Germany alone there are probably 5-10 people who are interested in a new production of the CB.

I would even be interested in some bare boards that need to populated manually.

-Jonas
 
If there is a chance to get a CB500 or revived and advanced version of it i´d join the orderlist !
I missed the orders of the former batch by few weeks....
 
BTW: Alex Freed said:
Apparently Steve has some new ideas about CB 2.0. So if there is enough
interest maybe we'll do another run after all, but it won't be the same
product.

-Alex.
Click to expand...

So, even if this run fails, there may be light at the and of the tunnel ;-)

-Jonas

UPDATE: Steve posted a official CB2 thread
 
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