Thanks to all who sent me copies of that MM58174A app note. I'm not quite
to the stage of using the contents, but it's nice to have.
I do have scans of the board that I intend to put up on my website, in the
meantime, I have been tracing the board and have puzzled out the 10 pin
connector - it's power, gnd, battery-backup for the 6114 and MM58174A,
serial in/out, and three of the I/O bits (SB, F2, F3) on the CPU. I have
raided the local electronics scrap bin (we have to sort our waste into
numerous categories from "burnables" to "food waste" to "light metal",
etc., including "electronic scrap") for the connector off of a dead CD-R
drive, mounted the power connector and the audio/master-slave connector
to a piece of perfboard, and constructed a daughter card that gives me
easy-to-plug-into access to the signals that the board needs, and, ta-da,
I just got a '>' prompt from its Tiny Basic.
At the moment, I haven't puzzled enough out to enter programs (I get an
"ERROR 1" - Out of Memory), but I can write statements in immediate mode
and see the results (FOR loops, PRINTs, etc.). If I pull its 6116, I
don't get a prompt, so I don't think it's a problem with the SRAM, but
"PRINT TOP" gives me -32768 rather than an expected 4353 or similar
number.
So one thing I'm going to do with this is to change its baud rate from
110 bps to the max of 4800... After that, who knows. I could use an
enclosure for it.
For something out of my junk drawer, it's pretty cool. I'm going to write
to the guy who gave it to me to see if he knows what it was used for.
I used to have access to an RB5X when I worked at COSI. Now, at least, I
can play around in its environment. Somewhere at home, I have a backup
of our robot disk. I'll have to see if I've brought an image of that
in my C-64 directory.
Let me recommend the INS8073 for anyone who wants that late-70s/early-80s
BASIC experience in a bread-board computer. I think you could put one
together on a single (large) breadboard slab. You'd need 40 pins for
the CPU, another 24 to 32 pins for the SRAM, and some sort of RS-232
level shifter, like a MAX-232. The rest is all caps and resistors.
-ethan
--
Ethan Dicks, A-130-S Current South Pole Weather at 21-Apr-2004 23:40 Z
South Pole Station
PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -81.4 F (-63.0 C) Windchill -113.3 F (-80.7 C)
APO AP 96598 Wind 7.2 kts Grid 059 Barometer 687.1 mb (10361. ft)
Ethan.Dicks_at_amanda.spole.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html
Received on Wed Apr 21 2004 - 18:58:04 BST