Exidy Sorcerer

From: Pete Turnbull <pete_at_dunnington.u-net.com>
Date: Fri May 18 02:25:09 2001

On May 17, 19:55, Louis Schulman wrote:

> Thanks, Peter. This is very helpful. I had figured out reversing the
> serial to parallel wiring, but didn't know about the dip switch
> settings. Mind is obviously the Mark 2.

My original one was, too. However, I sold it in 1982 and the one I have
now is a Mark 1.

Does yours have 48K? It's easy to add extra memory to bring it up to full
spec, but there is a timing problem that affects some boards when you fit
the third bank. I was unlucky and spent days trying to figure out what was
wrong when I bought the extra 8 chips, so eventually I sent it to a
Sorcerer dealer/repeairer and he not only modified it but gave me a diagram
showing the fix.

> Is there some way I could get copies of the manuals?

Not very easily. I don't have access to a scanner at the moment. However,
David Williams has quite a lot on his Trailing Edge website.

> Also, is there
> some way to create a ROM Pack? I really could use the Standard Basic
> ROM pack. Assuming I burn the chip, what else is there to the circuit?

That's not too hard. The Pac consists of a PCB with 4 x 2316 ROMs and a
2-chip decoder circuit, all mounted inside an 8-track tape cartridge shell.

It's perfectly possible to build a replacement using a single 2764 and a
74LS10. With a little care, the bare PCB can be inserted into the
cartridge slot, so you don't even need to cannibalise a "rare" 8-track
cartridge. I have a drawing for such a PCB which I'll put on my website
for you. Look for it at
http://www.dunnington.u-net.com/public/ExidyROMs/ROMPacPCB.ps

Minor caveat: although the date on the file tells me I drew this years ago,
the need to use it went away and I never built a prototype. It should
work, though. There are 17 places to put track pins to connect one side to
the other, two places to put capacitors (a 6V 10mfd tantalum and a 100nF
ceramic), at the end of the 74LS10 location, and both IC locations indicate
pin 1 by a square (instead of oval) pad.

The ROM images are already there, just concatenate them (in order) to make
a 2764.

-- 
Pete						Peter Turnbull
						Network Manager
						University of York
Received on Fri May 18 2001 - 02:25:09 BST

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