I decided to take a break from the hair-pulling stress of a normal school term and only signed up for part-time; I should have a lot more time to tinker over the next few months.

The past few weeks I have been doing battle with GCC and newlib, and it's nice to finally have a pretty much fully-functional libc. It certainly makes testing the hardware easier to not have to do everything in assembly. I spent a couple of hours today reading through the grossness that is the ATA standard, and managed to get a drive to spit out a proper device identify block. Reliability is TBD but at least it's probably wired up right! A little more work, a couple more newlib stubs, adding in fatfs and I should have a full file system.

While running some quick tests to make sure all the basics are being covered (software floats, malloc, etc) I couldn't help but grab this ascii mandebrot off the IOCCC page:

Now that I'll have more time, I'll also have no excuse not to set up the logic analyzer and debug the DMA controller. It's the heart of what really makes this board interesting and unique - I've never seen another homebrew use it, and it would be nice to use for floppy, ide, and the eventual frame buffer and sound cards I design. It's also roughly half the routing and chip count! Without it this is just any other 68k homebrew. Hopefully it's an easy fix, because re-spinning a board with this kind of size and part count is expensive, time consuming, and *really* disheartening..