Cool. We had a small company in San Diego called Metacomp (long gone now) design a Z8530 add on module for their 80186 based Multibus board. It had two Z8530 chips on it and you could have two modules on the base board. So 8 channels total per slot.
Yes, 8 was just about the maximum, simply because that would approach the limits of how many interrupts you could process before you'd inevitably start losing them. Also, space and power delivery limitations, and connector space on the backside made doing more than that very impractical. Or you had to take more than one interrupt per board but that was 'not done'. I've always loved working on that division line between hardware and software, as close to the metal as possible. Funny, I'd all but forgotten about this project, now I'm wondering if I still have the software somewhere, just searched for a bit and can't locate it, so there is a good chance I wrote it on company hardware. I did find another project that I'd forgotten about, a CAD program for sails for sailboats that I wrote in the 80's for TD Sails in the Netherlands. That was a great project to work on and I met some awesome people doing it.
Comments
Cool. We had a small company in San Diego called Metacomp (long gone now) design a Z8530 add on module for their 80186 based Multibus board. It had two Z8530 chips on it and you could have two modules on the base board. So 8 channels total per slot.
Yes, 8 was just about the maximum, simply because that would approach the limits of how many interrupts you could process before you'd inevitably start losing them. Also, space and power delivery limitations, and connector space on the backside made doing more than that very impractical. Or you had to take more than one interrupt per board but that was 'not done'. I've always loved working on that division line between hardware and software, as close to the metal as possible. Funny, I'd all but forgotten about this project, now I'm wondering if I still have the software somewhere, just searched for a bit and can't locate it, so there is a good chance I wrote it on company hardware. I did find another project that I'd forgotten about, a CAD program for sails for sailboats that I wrote in the 80's for TD Sails in the Netherlands. That was a great project to work on and I met some awesome people doing it.