A ‘245 transceiver, an oscillator (~12MHz) and some chicken feed. I’ve pulled the bitstream in a file available here, but because XILINX never documented that format, it’s pretty much useless. It is getting its bitstream fed by an external 12K serial PROM. The XC2064 is a 5V FPGA (the first of its kind actually), has 600-1000 logical gates and 58 user IO pins of which 32 are used. Well, you could simply rebuild the card, copy the bitstream from the serial PROM for the FPGA and you’re done.īut it’s not so easy, as the FPGA which has been used, the XILINX XC2064 is long time EOL’ed and if you buy old stock, they’re more expensive than a comparably recent CPLD – if they’re not Chinese fakes and/or broken… not mentioning that a simple copy-paste job is not really manly □ This job consists of two parts – dissect the hardware and to get a better understanding of this, the software/driver, too. So, again, it’s up to me to save the world… reverse-engineering time again! So I thought it might be interesting for me and others to make a re-release… Let’s re-animate the Number Cruncher! Woohoo! They both work with the same driver and yes, the NC is much more robust than the FPE.īut it seems that there are only a handful of them survived, if anymore at all. No schematic, no HDL, no nothing □ĭuring looooong and wild eBay raids I managed to get my hands onto an FPE as well as on an NumberCruncher. I directly contacted the creators of the NC, Dirk and Andreas, but both of them hadn’t had a tiny bit of the NC left. comes with lots of mathematical software and an enhanced SANE patch by Albert Chin-A-Young.works with TransWarp GS and Zip GS accelerators and RamFAST SCSI card.works in any slot (slot 3 & 4 without need for setting it to “Your Card”).you can compile ORCA/Pascal and C programs to use it directly with the special floatlib for the FPE provided by The Byte Works.supports the FPE SANE patch for speeding up any program that does floating point calculations.much less sensible to heat, voltage problems etc.totally compatible with the FPE from Innovative Systems.This is the “marketing blurb” from back then “The Number Cruncher is compatible with the FPE but is actually what the FPE was supposed to be – a math coproc that works. Fine German engineering □ And the newsgroup post was quite nice to it: “īut a bit later there was something better available: The Number Cruncher (NC for short). This happens in a non deterministic way, and software written for that engineering junk must be adapted to that. “The FPE is suffering from a major problem, namely the coproc is crashing internally and has to be reset in software. That’s a small card featuring just a buffer, an old XILINX FPGA (actually the first of its kind) and the Motorola 68881 floating point co-processor.Īfter more research I learned that the FPE was actually a diva like this newsgroup post says: You might have stumbled about my post/project connecting a Transputer to the Apple II called the T2A2… well, what I did not mention was, that the inspiration to this came from another card built in 1988, called the FPE made by Innovative Systems. Your original files are renamed with the prefix “_org_” just in case.This is a post I’d like to write since 2006… so 15 years after I’ve put all the Transputer, MIPS, i860 and-what-not stuff aside and made some room for my other (late) love: The Apple IIgs. If a finished file is not smaller after being processed, it will not be saved.1.3 - Added cool progress bar and gratuitous animation.1.3 - Fixed exception when dealing with Unicode file paths.It’s now properly signed with our Developer ID.Processing is now threaded and significantly faster.We’ve just updated ShrinkIt to version 1.3, and wanted to let you know! It’s generally for simple PDF symbols and glyphs you might use in your apps, where saving space is critical. Note, though: it’s not really for long complex PDF documents or bitmap images. ShrinkIt takes bloated Adobe-saved graphic PDFs, runs them through Apple’s PDF renderer, and saves them back out, making many of them smaller without any quality loss. (Yes, we actually have a registered trademark on ShrinkIt®. Quite some time ago, we made a quick, free, handy tool called ShrinkIt®.
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