Wanted: ASM-48 for Intellec MDS-2

F.Ulivi fulivi at tiscali.it
Thu Apr 2 08:09:35 CDT 2015


Hi everyone,

I'm looking for a dump (or the real floppy!) of the ASM-48 assembler
that ran on Intel MDS-2 systems. It seems that it is very rare (maybe it
didn't sell too well back in its days). After a few days of googling I
still have no idea of the Intel part-number for it. Other assemblers
(e.g. ASM80) are much more common.
The reason I'm looking for it is to re-implement the firmware in the PIO
processor (a 8041A) of the MDS-2 emulator I'm writing for MESS. I
thought it would be a nice idea to write the firmware by using the
system itself: it is a development system after all!
I think I've no hope of finding an image of the original firmware. The
original PIO is a masked ROM version that Intel produced for itself. The
only way to dump it, I guess, is by decapping and photographing the die.
By the way, if you are interested, check my preliminary version of the
emulator (imds2 in 0.160 release of MESS): it's not complete (PIO it's
not there, for example) but it can run all ISIS-II sw I could find.
I hope I'm not "offending" anyone in this forum by mentioning an
emulator, it looks like you are mostly focused on real (vintage) hardware..

Just out of curiosity: is there anyone among you who owns a MDS-2 system?

Thanks!
-- F.Ulivi


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