Of Prototypes and Shout Outs

I just got off the phone with Gary, who completed the design of revision 1 of the Liber809 board.  Three prototype boards will be ordered and should be in late next week or early the week after.   The plan is to populate and test them to further improve the design and work out any remaining issues (there don't appear to be any).  I'll keep one around and get the other two into the hands of people who can take the project a bit farther along.

After that, we'll look at a larger run that will be sold in kit form through Cloud-9.

I thought I would dedicate the rest of this blog post to the people and products that made the project a success.  Nothing is created in a vacuum, and it was certainly true in this case.  So thanks to:

• My wife, for putting up with my being holed up in the shop late into the evenings while I hammered this thing out.
• Gary Becker for his significant contributions to the design of the Liber809, doing the board layout and just generally being available for questions and the like.  Without Gary's help it would have taken much, much longer for me to complete this project.
• Mark Marlette and James Daggett for their input during the electrical mating phase of the project.
• The great folks on the AtariAge forums (www.atariage.com/forums) for the help and encouragement., including Rybags (thanks for all of the 6502 test code!) and sloopy (for the SIO2PC adapter and technical guidance on the Atari stuff).
• The CoCo guys on the Malted Media mailing list for championing me forward.
• tschak, dmlloyd, syscall, a8isa1, joey_z and others in the Atari IRC group who helped me decipher the ANTIC and other Atari hardware.
• My trusty iMac (www.apple.com) which powers the cross assemblers and other tools which made the NitrOS-9 port go quick and easy.  Gotta love Apple computers.
• Intronix (www.pctestinstruments.com) for their LogicPort analyzer, which made this project SO much easier (and fun!)
• Craig Moates (www.moates.net) for his awesome Ostrich 2.0 ROM emulator which saved me tons of development time.
• The ToolShed software (http://sourceforge.net/projects/toolshed/) and specifically, the mamou 6809 cross-assembler which rocked the house.
• NitrOS-9 (www.nitros9.org) for being such a cool little OS, and to the guys at Microware (Larry, Ken, and Robert) who created OS-9 for the 6809 over 30 years ago...

I hope I didn't miss anybody.