--- Tony Duell <ard_at_p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote: > >
> > The box in question is a RML-380Z-D model, with
> dual 5
> > 1/4" drives, and I think, 32K RAM. It has two
> video
>
> There is room for 32K RAM (2 rows of 4116s) on the
> CPU card.
Oh - must have miscounted :-/
> If you have
> the RAM expansion card (which, as you imply is a CPU
> board with the CPU
> and many other chips messing and a different address
> decoder PROM) then
> you possibly have up to 56K RAM.
I has an address *prom*? I thought it was purely TTL?
I s'pose its hard to tell with all the pretty little
coloured[1] splodges all over the socketed chips
(presumably to aid the people who put the chips in...)
> COS = Cassette Operating System, and is basically a
> bootstrap loader (for
> cassette or disk) and a machine code monitor.
I figured that much out eventually :)
> I should have a system disk somewhere, but it would
> take some time to find
> it.
Kewl - any system disk, even a duplicate is good - at
least one may work.
> I also should have the COS user manual (giving
> some of the calls,
> etc)
In what format? Electronic? (i.e. easily sharable?)
> but I don't have the optional source lisitng of
> COS (and FWIW, I'm
> looking for it too).
As soon as the <insert your own expletive> person who
broke our lab's device programmer fixes it - i'll dump
the COS roms. I managed to dump the disk rom, using
an older programmer - but it wouldn't touch the older,
mainboard devices - It complained of over-current. I
suspect it was not intended to cope with *all* devices
- unlike our really fancy new one - which is broke :(
> Yes, or X to boot with the floppies swapped over
> (the 'B' drive is A:).
> The latter is useful if one drive decides to fail...
How thoughtful of RML :)
> There is an LED on the
> floppy
> > controller, it flashes with a kind of 'heart beat'
> > pattern i.e.
> Flash-flash--pause--flash-flash--pause
>
> Are you sure this is a standard RML disk controller?
> I can't find any LED
> on the schematics, and I don't remember there being
> one when I looked
> inside my machine. The standard disk controller is
> one card that fits
> onto the 50 way 'bus' ribbon cable, and which
> contains a 1771 disk
> controller (Single density only) and a 8251-based
> serial port (device SIO-4)
Um, no! I know nowt about this box - I'll check the
disk controller very carefully tonight. Its software
is certaining interesting - very wacky code, quite a
bit of it polymorphic - just to hurt your brain :-/
The card *is* on the main bus, and is connected to the
floppy and serial port. It is also stamped (C)RML,
ISTR.
I've a really nasty feeling, this machine has been a
student project, and they used the floppy controller
as a secondary cpu :) Should there be a mostek MT4802
(2Kx8 SRAM) in the socket above the eprom? It doesn't
even occupy all the socket (which is suspicious) and
the ROM does contain memory sizing routines...they're
obvious :) I *really* hope not!
Dave.
[1] Appologies if you think I spelt it wrogn ;0
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Received on Mon Nov 20 2000 - 09:50:25 GMT