Hi folks...

Developer News 13/02/97 (in which Dave gets a year older...)

NetStation
----------
As those of you who have ordered Ethernet NetStations may have noticed, they
have not shipped yet. Indeed, they haven't shipped here yet either! The
reason for this is a component supply hold-up for some of the silicon on the
Ethernet card; modem versions, if they are not shipping already, should
start shipping in very small quantity now-ish.

Also I've found it necessary to to remove public access rights from the
archived NetStation boot sequence on the Developer WWW site; other than the
issue of a small breach of copyright (major-league oops!) in the current
build, there are currently a few other factors involved which, until they
are resolved, mean that the release of the sequence needs to be put on hold.
I should, if all goes well, be able to make a new release when I get back on
March 3rd.

Expansion Bus Usage Survey
--------------------------
Before we set about implementing IOMD2, it would be useful for us to have
details of what Acorn Expansion Bus (DEBI bus, Podule Bus or whatever)
functions are used by third-party hardware developers. To this end, the guys
in Hardware have compiled a short questionnaire about which signals and
cycle types are in use and whether expansion card driver code writes
directly to hardware registers or uses the OS. If you have any expansion
cards on sale or in development which communicate via the podule bus, we'd
appreciate it if you could fill in the details and email it back to us; as
we could do with the results before I come back at the start of March,
please email them to Alex Bienek (abienek@acorn.co.uk) CC me.

BTW, you may realise from this questionnaire that the spec for Risc PC 2 is
still very much a moving target; "DON'T PANIC!" about the rumours in
comp.sys.acorn.* , as currently they can only be based on semi-informed
speculation...

-------------
The Questionnaire: 

Which access cycles do you use ?

Module (iorq/iogt)
Podule slow
Podule medium
Podule fast
Synchronous
EASI type A
EASI type C
DMA type A
DMA type B
DMA type C
DMA type D

Interrupts ?
PIRQ
PFIQ

Clocks ?
CLK2
CLK8
REF8M
CLK16

Others ?
Ready
I2C


Direct hardware register access ?
Cycle timing control
Interrupt control

What features would you like to see in the next-generation expansion bus?
-------------

Anyway, that's me done for the day; off to the pub for my birthday tea (26
today).

Cheers,

Dave