Research Machines Link 480Z

From: Paul Williams <flo_at_rdel.co.uk>
Date: Sun Mar 19 04:49:43 2000

Tony Duell wrote:
>
> From what I remember, this machine is painful to take apart, with
> dozens of screws. Unlike the 380Z which involves taking out 2 screws
> and pulling the top of the case.

Six on the bottom, four for the keyboard and another four for the Mini
Station Options board, which is largely unpopulated. I can see from the
mismatched screws on the bottom that it has been taken apart many times
before!

> The video RAM, at least the text mode RAM, seems to be mapped into
> the I/O space, but I've not really looked at that.

Poking all the RAM locations from Front Panel gave me that impression,
along with a few crashes, but hey, Reset and straight back into Front
Panel! I think that the high res graphics are also I/O mapped, which is
why they are so slow.

I wrote a sprite routine for the 480Z, but it was only flicker-free for
sprites with a width of 20 pixels or fewer, because I had to output to
one port to give me a time window to the RAM, and then pump bytes
containing four pixels through another port. I wish I'd kept all those
listings now.
Received on Sun Mar 19 2000 - 04:49:43 GMT