I have a card with the only markings on it being Adaptive Peripherals.
It's quite interesting.
Onboard are several (6) 24 pin RCA packages marked CDM6116, which I
believe are ROMs. The rest is TTL.
It leads out to an external box with a centronics interface on it, a
switch and LED, and two phono jacks. The switch in one direction seems
to activate it, as when I turn on the computer with the switch in that
position the LED lights and the system is frozen. The switch in the other
position results in a normal boot. If I flip the switch while the system
is on then it locks up. If I switch it back and then do a reset, the
system resumes.
Before I attached a monitor to it, it seemed to make the computer do
something different. The normal "beep" when I turned the system on was
replaced with a "boop". I finally hooked a monitor up but now the card
does not seem to do anything. I hope I didn't fry it as when I was
carrying it upstairs I plugged the dangling printer cable from the
parallel card into the centronics interface in the external box to keep it
from swinging around. When I first powered it on it was shorting
something as the power supply was cycling on/off. I turned it off
quickly and unplugged the cable, then turned it on to hear the "boop"
sound. So it seemed to be doing something weird until I plugged the
monitor in to see what the heck was going on.
It's in slot 4, so I checked the memory area at $C400 but there is nothing
there.
It also has a two AAA batteries on the back which I've taken out. They
don't seem to affect the operation. I'm going to put two fresh batteries
on to see what different it makes.
I'm thinking this was an alternate ROM card, maybe for development or
cracking games, although it seems to elaborate for the latter.
Any ideas?
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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International Man of Intrigue and Danger
http://www.vintage.org
Received on Thu Sep 27 2001 - 02:04:02 BST