amiga-news.de - Individual Computers: Pre-ordering of Indivision ECS V3 started

16.Sep.2021
Individual Computers (ANF) Individual Computers: Pre-ordering of Indivision ECS V3 started
From today on it is possible to pre-order the Flickerfixer/Scandoubler 'Indivision ECS V3' produced by Individual Computers. Some notes of the developer:

"Indivision ECS V3 will replace Indivision ECS V2. Although very unusual for iComp, I had to make a re-design without actually adding new features. The main reason why a new design was required was the global chip shortage that you've surely heard about in the media. Two rather low-cost chips, and the main FPGA were either wildly expensive, or not available at all. I was lucky enough to find a small quantity of FPGAs on the free market for a moderate premium of "only" 160%, but could not find the right footprint part for the H/V sync driver and the data drivers. Instead of the SC-70 package for the H/V driver, I found a slightly bigger part with the same functionality. Luckily, that part of the board had enough space.

The data drivers were a single 16-bit chip on the V2 design. This became unavailable these past months, so I replaced it with two 8-bit drivers.

Instead of soldering the male-to-male adapter directly to the board, I decided to solder a socket to the circuit board, where the male-to-male adapter will be inserted. Background of this decision is a few service cases where pins of this adapter broke off, and it was very tedious to replace the part. The improved order of parts makes V3 much more servicable, as the adapter can now be exchanged without soldering. I'd expect that most useres can replace the adapter on their own, so shipping the flicker fixer to us for service is becoming less likely to be required.

Another thing that got hard-to-find was the IC that I've been using for the 25MHz oscillator. I wasn't too worried when the distributor told me that the lead time for this part is just over 50 weeks, as we've had complaints from A600 users that the crystal conflicts with the RTC module in some cases. I have therefore decided to buy 25MHz integrated 3.3V oscillators. While this is considerably more expensive, it is only a small contribution to the overall price increase, and has the added benefit of being much smaller than the HC49S-sized crystal of the V2 design.

One thing that is truly different from the V2 design is the output stage. On a component level, it does look almost the same as V2, but went through an expensive CE approval process, and vastly improves picture quality when used on problematic Samsung monitors and similar models that use the same input stage.

The new output stage uses high-frequency transistors as drivers, allowing much sharper edges at higher drive strength, eliminating "ghosting" that was described with certain problematic monitors.

Another thing we have improved is compatibility with motherboards that have a mouse/joystick multiplexer chip from Mitsubishi: While V2 had trouble dealing with the extremely long propagation delay of this chip, the CPLD of the V3 design deals with this problem without the need to adapt to a specific Amiga main board revision. This CPLD code can also be applied on the V2 design, so we now have a solution for existing V2 customers as well." (dr)

[News message: 16. Sep. 2021, 06:39] [Comments: 0]
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