Origins

And this all started about twelve years ago when I've spotted these two huge pcb boards dumped on a sideroad near some other uninteresting trash. These two boards had a lot of eproms (uv erasable) easily identifiable by the stickers on them covering the UV window and identified by the letters "ROM1 ODD" "ROM1 EVEN" and so on up to ROM32 or so. There was also these big population of small chips all over the boards. (later I've realized that this boards probably belonged to some arcade machine)

And in the middle of one board there it was, this huge chip named MC68000P8.

The original CPU scavenged from the original PCB

Back in that time my knowledge in electronics was pretty limited, so I didn't have a clue of what that huge chip was. After some quick research I've found out that it was a 32-bit CPU! I remember there were some websites with a lot of information and a few schematics on how to connect this big chip. The other chips lying around where mostly buffers, latches, glue logic a Yamaha chip (for sound effects) and some other unattractive 8-bit CPU (the 6502 if I remember correctly, maybe used to deal with the sound).

So, there I was with with the 68k in my hand and very enthusiastic in getting that thing up and running!


In the next post I'll talk about from the first sign of life to the fully functional board with serial bootloader.