Alldata System 3 (!!)

From: jpero_at_cgocable.net <(jpero_at_cgocable.net)>
Date: Mon Feb 22 00:52:22 1999

Hi!

While looking at the bottom with bottom cover removed, of the
Alldata System 3, It's 1989 classic machine as you will see. I
became very suspcious feeling it's vaguely famillar looking looking
at that motherboard.

Unscrew the "Alldata" add on board to reveal partly hidden to see
whole board and...

It's Atari ST series! Whaaat?

What it has: old style 68000 DIP IC, soldered 32 x 256K x 1bit
DRAM DIPs (1MB), internal 34pin FD, ASCI "internal" where a
external port used to be hooking to the "Alldata addon board that
sports extra roms for fonts, scsi, bit of circuitry for Keyboard and
mouse and also for the Alldata's internal thermal printer. The
original Atari motherboard retains game cartidge, monitor port
oddball 10 pin type that is external hooks to a relabeled "Alldata"
standard atari mono monitor, standard atari mouse and parallel and
one more port.

I have the Atari's motherboard ID number to help determine exact
type of this one:

C070523-001 Rev D1

Thanks!

Repaired it and found out that any oldstyle MS white dovebar
mouse ball fits nicely if you have a atari mouse with lost mouse
ball. Turned out wrong boot disk was used rendering the cdrom
reader useless. Whew. The old Toshiba 1X caddy cdrom drive in it
is complex animal, lots of work to take apart and assembling.
That drive tricked anyone who is not used to "hold that eject button
until caddy ejects". Including me! Hehehehe!

I have another newer Alldata machine PSU repair in progress. It's
built out of stock peecee parts based on pentium 75 only difference
is a special ISA card that drive the built in thermal printer. Uses
SCSI cdrom and standard adaptec 1610/1615 adapter. Running
win95sux. I got the machine back to owner using peecee PSU and
had told owner to use standard parallel printer while fixing the
alldata PSU, all thermal printers in them is 24VDC juice.

Alldata is still around but no longer doing hardware, just software
side with automotive database. alldata.com

Wizard
Received on Mon Feb 22 1999 - 00:52:22 GMT