now it gets really interesting can u narrow the year down 2005/ 2004 or earlier ? then we can use the internet archive anyone else maybe read the forum and has the pictures saved somewhere ?
lol now i found them where in the totally wrong folder yes thats defintifly not rpas or my unit the cable from the switch seems to go to one of the condensators near the cpus wonder if they maybe could hard switch it to 1 powerpc instead of 2 ?
I know who has that unit but I haven't been able to contact him for a long time. He used to own the one that I have now. @Windowskiller: In what form where the productions M2 sold in? What was they're purpose?
I think you folks need to commit some of this info to the Wikipedia M2 article. I put the specs up on there a while back, out of an issue of Next Gen and a PPC FAQ
I got my controllers, and popped some pictures up on my site. It looks like one was taken apart and not put together correctly, so some of the wires hang out a little bit.
I figured I would go ahead and post the internals for all to see. Warning: pics are extremely large (like 5 mpixel range). Sorry for the flash, will snap better pics in the coming days. Shell outside Shell inside Board front Board rear Thoughts and observations (nothing really that important): 1.) The cases at miniumum were made by CH, makers of crappy controllers for video game systems in the early-mid 90's 2.) Controllers were made by hand (boards were of course wave soldered). Notice the hand routed channel in the top portion of the inner case to allow room for the cable 3.) The case that it came in was originally designed for wireless controllers. You can see the battery compartment for 2 AAA batteries on the inside and mold lines for the cover on the back (has the arrow pointing down stamped on it). 4.) I haven't had a chance to google any part #'s yet. From the looks of it, the FPGA (large chip) was programmed after the board was assembled. I say this because of the interface clearly printed right next to the connector which is coupled to a hex inverter. I would guess the sram chip contains the code for the FPGA and was programmed separatly and installed after the board was all put together? I'm sure that was more information than anyone cares to know the m2 proto controller. I plan on investigating it more whenever I can get a day off. Its a shame the guy selling them wouldn't give up the info on where exactly they came from. When asked I got this response: No matter what, he would not divulge location or name of this business to me. Onto other news, I found out today that Panasonic had planned to apparently offer a dvd-rom adapter for the FZ-21 via PCMCIA. I wonder if this actually made it to production?
from the little I understand of fpga they are ram based so they don't contain the code them self but get it copied over at startup from a rom chip.. so I'm guessing the socketed chip on the right is an eprom or something similar? but considering how little I really know of fpga (and electronics in general) I might as well be wrong ^^
Yep, that little socketed chip holds the code for the FPGA, and the FPGA will request it and configure itself at boot. See here: http://www.scs.ch/~lbreuss/electronic_parts/electronic_parts.html where you can get the datasheet (http://www.xilinx.com/bvdocs/publications/ds070.pdf). Should be a trivial matter to read the code from it; probably wouldn't do you much good though... Stone
Depends on the package. most fpga's can be programmed however you want, including setting up space for ram and what not. It's usually up to the developer to decide whether its possible/cost efficient to use spare gates as memory cells. I would guess that in this case they decided to go with off chip memory so they could change the specs whenenver they pleased without having to rewrite the fpga code. Just a guess. ...unless I can find an emulator for it to probe the logic. I would gather that the control interface is not terribly complicated (its a video game controller after all), its more what type of bus it communicates with. I know all m2's were keyboard/mouse capable, no idea how it handled them and if they tied into the controller ports in any way. I've googled and downloaded the data sheets, I just haven't had any time to wade through them yet. At the current time, this is on the low end of my priorities. It's more of a curiousity than anything. I haven't really thought that far into it yet (I was hoping that when I bought it, it would be something simple that I could re-create on a breadboard, not a fullscale miniature computer).
the m2s could use a keyboard connected via a keyboard adapter through the controller ports was some pretty big box where you put in the keyboard plug and from the box a short wire/cable connected to the controller plug (thats from a manual which i have read some time ago could be from the fz35 or the ft21 but i cant find it gotta dig through my archives soon)
I wasn't aware that the FZ-21S was sold as a kiosk system. What did it look like? Did it look just like the black M2 units? What was it used for?
