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ISA - PCI Conversion

Hi
Does anybody can help me with PLX PCI9030 IC?
I have an old ISA design, and i need to convert it to PCI.
I bought the prototyping kit, PCI9030-RDK. PLX doesnt give ANY support
for me, maybe
because i am not a big chinese manufacturer or something.....
Ok, my first hard question is.... I think it´s easier to develop this
board as being a Legacy PCI, because my old design is ISA based, nature

born Legacy. Can i hardwire the expansion rom address (to the bridge
IC), for example 0xc0000? These questions are more IC specific,
what makes this topic anoyng...
If anybody can point me some schematics would be great.
Tks
Pedro.
 
B

Ben Jackson

Jan 1, 1970
0
If anybody can point me some schematics would be great.

If you google for the part and throw on filetype:pdf you can
find this, among other things:

http://www-ese.fnal.gov/eseproj/BTeV/TestBeam02/PtaRev1c.pdf

Looks like it has a eeprom for configuration.

Depending on what your card does (and how many you want to make) it
might be easier to buy something like:

http://www.altera.com/products/devkits/altera/kit-maxii-1270.html

There used to be a deal where you could get those for $99, but even
at $150 it's a bargain.
 
P

Paul Burke

Jan 1, 1970
0
I bought the prototyping kit, PCI9030-RDK. PLX doesnt give ANY support
for me, maybe
because i am not a big chinese manufacturer or something.....

If PLX didn't give you a CD with it all on (I suspect they did), you can
download all the required schematics from their site. In my experience
they give excellent support.

Can i hardwire the expansion rom address (to the bridge
IC), for example 0xc0000?

No, PCI won't let you do that. Though you could write a program to
change the address yourself- depending on OS, you might need something
like TVicHW to get at the hardware though. You'll also have to check
that the address you want hasn't been allocated to something else too.
Check out Ralf Brown's PCI programs if you use DOS.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/ralf/pub/WWW/files.html

Paul Burke
 
Sorry, forgot to say.... my board loads the OS... no windows, dos
loaded by the board. Dos goes in an eprom at the board.
 
N

Nico Coesel

Jan 1, 1970
0
Sorry, forgot to say.... my board loads the OS... no windows, dos
loaded by the board. Dos goes in an eprom at the board.

Even today, some bioses allow a PCI network card to boot the system.
For this purpose the network card is fitted with an EPROM. Try to find
out how that works. Even the cheapes network cards have EPROM sockets.
Buy such a card and make it run your software from that EPROM so you
know you have working software in your EPROM. Next step is to 'clone'
the part of that card that holds the EPROM. A program called PCItree
is very usefull for accessing the configuration area of a PCI card.
 

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