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I actually managed to find a seller on eBay from China who was selling real ones for like $1.50 a piece. They're used, of course, but it's not a rebadged 4 MHz 68000 that throws an exception when you try to change the VBR register.


I got a few from ebay 1-2yr ago. They're not rebadged (at least the half I actually use).


Ended up with rebadged ones at the beginning of the year. I didn't even know about the fakes situation at the time I purchased them. Was real careful the second time around.

My side project is to make an MMU for it with an FPGA. The board doing the logic level shifting was my first custom PCB design!


Also messing around with FPGAs, but it looks like you are further along.

If you don't mind saying, what level shifter chips are you using? I suspect 74LVC245 is far from ideal... and that I'll need to get some PCBs made.


I'm using the 74LVCH245. It's 74LVC with bus hold logic so the inputs don't float if the 68010 pins go tristate. The largest headache I had in choosing was that the 68010 is an NMOS chip operating with TTL logic levels. At 3.3V, the LVCH245's input are TTL compatible, below 0.8V is a logical 0, above 2V is considered logical 1 (same as TTL).

For the pins on the 68010 which are wire-OR (RESET#, HALT#, etc.), I have a 4.7K pullup on them, the input side of a 74LVCH245, and the output side of a 74LVC06 (inverted) or 74LVC07 (buffer), which have open drain outputs. The input side of those go to the FPGA. That way it can drive those pins or see when they're being driven by another device.

The typical propagation delay is 3 ns at room temperature, with a worst case of 7 ns. However, the whole system is operating at a 12.5 MHz. (80 ns clock period).

If it makes you feel any better, I have a few PC/104 25/33 MHz 386EX SBCs from 2001 that use 74LVC245s as bus redrivers. If they're good for a 33 MHz (66 MHz FCLK) 386, I can't imagine any issues occurring with a 12.5 MHz 68k (https://docs.embeddedarm.com/TS-3100).

A preliminary test of this whole thing was attaching an Arduino Mega (16 MHz, 5V) via the external bus interface connected with 3x 74LVC245A (DIP) (one for AD0-7, one for A8-15, one for control signals) to a Mojo v3 (Spartan 6 LX9). I basically made a bunch of ARM style peripherals for it (32 bit counters, etc.) that it could interface to. Didn't have any troubles in the ~12 hours I left it running.

Arduino: https://imgur.com/5uEVJyN 68010 Prototype: https://imgur.com/ydJ5OCU

The breadboard things are using the DIP version of the 74LVC245A, the PCB version has the 74LVCH245, which is only available in surface mount.


Much appreciated! There was too much in there I was unaware of.




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