I can confirm that. I picked up my Unipod from STDevel at a Wakefield show - it was the year they debuted it and in the talk they mentioned the Key.I'm not sure I'd come to that conclusion. UniPod was originally sold per-feature, though all the UniPods I've got/seen don't even have the "key" EEprom on the board that controls suchlike - everything is just unlocked, so my inclination would be that it's not a CPLD update, but this keying, possibly (probably) coupled with appropriate RISC OS support modules - to be updated by running !Snafu as usual.
I pointed out that it was missing when they packed up my board and they told me that a fully unlocked board is programmed as fully unlocked, and don't need the Key chip to unlock extra features.
My guess is fully-unlocked units have a CPLD which just plain has everything enabled by default and doesn't check for a key. Only restricted units would check for a key chip, in case you'd bought upgrades later on.
I also asked about the expansion card spec by email, and they insisted it was proprietary and couldn't be provided.. the only question they answered in that email was the one about whether there was an IDE disk activity LED connector (there is, and it has the same pinout as the RISC PC motherboard, you can pick one or the other.. combining the two is left as an exercise to the reader)
Short of someone from Simtec popping up and saying "the I/O address is &... from the offset of the Podule base" then the best way I can think to figure it out is to pull the ROM apart. The interrupt mask register should be identified in the Extended ECID header, the Podule Loader should identify the ROM window base and size, and some disassembly and staring at the IDE and USB drivers should give the IDE and USB base addresses. Logically the expansion port should be somewhere in the gap, and the second printer port (?) will be somewhere else in that gap.
Statistics: Posted by philpem — Wed Nov 13, 2024 11:16 am