What needs doing?

[squaresausage]

First off, thank you for the monumental amount of work you have already done to reverse engineer the pc110.

You have said on the readme that people can help by reviewing pcbs and schematics, but is there any tracking for what has and has not been validated?

I have an almost working pc110, plus some broken ones, and I am an embedded engineer by trade, and I would like to contribute :)

[ahmadexp]

Hello @squaresausage,

Thank you for your willingness to help and all your kind words.
To be honest, I have not put much thought yet on how to scale the verification process with more people, and I am open to any suggestions. We have a Discord server (link to join: https://discord.gg/efCgGz95) for discussions that can be utilized somehow.
If you are looking for something immediate and fun, yet so vital, here is a good one for you.
Between the Bowman ASIC and the chipset (VL82C420), there are 5 connection lines. We need to identify those. Keep in mind, we still did not have a chance to find the datasheet for the VL82C420, and all the identified pinouts were discovered by looking at where they are connected.
Why is this important, if you wonder? Well, aside from the fun factor, if we want to swap the CPU, RAM, and the chipset for a Vortex86 and keep most of the motherboard original, knowing those pins would be vital.
From the little information out there, the SCAMP IV architecture (which includes the VL82C420), there is a serial port in those five connections (perhaps a TX and RX) to send the interrupts to the chipset. This connection is between the VL82C420 and VL82C144. Since we only have the VL82C420 and not the VL82C144, the VL82C144 has been somehow implemented on the Bowman ASIC (gate array).
You can also have more fun looking into the firmware on the M38 Power Management Microcontroller and find out about some more of those pins, and hopefully the power sequence.
There is a lot to cover, discover, learn, and have fun in this project, and I cannot wait to see what you can do.
Oh, and one more thing, disassembling the BIOS and porting it to run on the SeaBIOS will be another crazy project to do if we want to make Vortex86 integration a reality.
There are a lot of pins connecting from the PSU board to the motherboard that will reveal a ton of info to us if we can get the identified.
Writing all of this made me think, maybe I should start a laundry list and have people take different tasks, or even add to the tasks.
Anyways, looking forward to seeing your contributions.

Ahmad