Hi,
I've started playing around with this old XT/AT compatible machine I've
had for a while, called the Microbyte PC-230. It's designed locally in
South Australia. My question regards the OS installation.
A thoughtful person has uploaded the installation disks to
driverguide.com but they're not images, but ZIP files of the contents of
the install disks. It seems the install program checks the disk label or
something similar to see if the correct disk is in the drive. I don't
know the disk label or anything else about the original disks so I can't
install the OS on the hard drive. The original hard drive is a 20MB
Miniscribe which has developed bad sectors, so I've installed a 511MB
DEC badged hard drive. The system has the odd feature of having on-board
SCSI. It's an 8086 (NEC V30).
I've had a poke through (or peek as it were) the INSTALL.EXE file on
disk 1. There are a heap of null-terminated strings towards the end of
it. Just after the message which says to insert disk 1 it has the string
"\MBSCO1". I can only assume this is the disk label, but setting the
disk for that doesn't let the program continue. Even setting the disk
with a backslash in Linux doesn't help. After the second insert disk
message there's a "\MBSCO2" string too. Perhaps I'm missing something.
Any thoughts?
Alexis.
I believe that the project you are interested in is the one done by Ingo Cyliax at Indiana University. He developed (for a class I believe) an ISA form factor board that had a MC68030. At one time I had all the artwork & schematics (I may still??). A search brought up a couple of references, but the page at Indiana University seems to have been taken down. It was a pretty good system, including interfaces for keyboards and mice (I believe). It DID have ISA slots, and the ROM software worked against a standard IDE/Serial/Parallel board set, booting the disk. The memory was fixed at 4 megs (I may be wrong at this), and used the synchronous interface of the MC68030. The ISA portion used the async interface for the ISA timing, and an interrupt multiplexer multi interface chip (MC68901??) to handle the keyboard I/O.
The web site also included a frame buffer that used an alternate interface that was provided for. I believe that there was an edition of Minix that ran on it as well. I suspect that with a little work 68k Linux ought to work, as the MC68030 has an MMU.
Maybe someone can use this information to access the Wayback machine and get a proper pointer.
Hope this helps.
> Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2010 01:30:35 -0600
> From: Ben <bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca>
> The MMU bit reminded about DACK GROUNDED. I think that was the news
> letter I saw on the web. Guess what ! All about hooking a 68000 to
> a apple II for numeric processing.
> The news letter may be easier to find than a 68020.
The Mac LC used a 68020. I'm not sure whether it was socketed or soldered
though. The LC was more or less free not too many years ago. I'm not
sure what availability is like now.
Really, it's a kindness to take the 68020 out of an LC. The LC only had
a 16 bit wide data bus. Just senseless.
Jeff Walther
Hi! Just out of curiosity does anyone know of any home brew ISA bus 68K
boards?
I've seen numerous home brew 68K projects of varying styles but none meant
to plug into the PC/AT ISA bus. I tried Google but nothing obvious turned
up. Ideas/URLs appreciated.
Thanks and have a nice day!
Andrew Lynch
PS, something like this but with more detail
http://john.ccac.rwth-aachen.de:8000/as/pcpar.html
I have a couple of boards, clearly DEC, with numbers X020 and X030.
They are both hex height - pretty standard, with the cast metal
bracket holding the board ejectors. The X020 board is marked DATA PATH
and the X030 board is marked CDC DISK CONTROL. Are these for the DEC
badged CDC 97xx drives?
--
Will
For those who follow my Mosaic-CK project, version 2.7ck9 is out, which
improves the basic NCSA Mosaic rendering core with improved horizontal
positioning, makes image loads asynchronous, adds a Dock icon and better
integration with Mac OS X, and fixes a lot of bugs.
For those who don't, it's my little playground and historical preservation
of NCSA Mosaic, updated to build and run on modern operating systems, with
both an alternative renderer to actually be vaguely useful as a basic
browser and the classic renderer to show people just how far we've come.
Binary available for Mac OS X 10.4+. Should build on just about anything
with gcc 2 or better and X11R5 or higher. I'm slowly working on getting my
Solbourne S3000 back in shape so I can build binaries on that too (they
would likely be generically SPARC compatible, but this probably builds on
SunOS already anyway).
http://www.floodgap.com/retrotech/machten/mosaic/
--
------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
-- He is rising from affluence to poverty. -- Mark Twain ----------------------
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andrew Lynch [mailto:lynchaj at yahoo.com]
> Sent: Saturday, July 10, 2010 5:49 PM
> To: 'cctalk at classiccmp.org'
> Subject: 68K ISA project
>
> Hi! Just out of curiosity does anyone know of any home brew ISA bus 68K
> boards?
>
> I've seen numerous home brew 68K projects of varying styles but none meant
> to plug into the PC/AT ISA bus. I tried Google but nothing obvious turned
> up. Ideas/URLs appreciated.
>
> Thanks and have a nice day!
>
> Andrew Lynch
>
> PS, something like this but with more detail
>
> http://john.ccac.rwth-aachen.de:8000/as/pcpar.html
[AJL>]
Hi! Thanks for the replies. Please let me further clarify what I am
looking for. As part of the N8VEM project I do research into what sorts of
designs are possible and practical for home brew constructions. Part of
that is researching what sort of home brew/hobbyist designs have gone before
to see what has been done and how it was designed and constructed.
Commercial solutions are available however they are typically proprietary
and lack the important schematics and/or other design information I need.
I am not aware of any 68K home brew projects for the ISA bus with the
exception of the PCPAR68000 mentioned in the 1989 mc article. Would anyone
have access to that article or other similar 68K ISA bus projects?
Similarly home brew S-100 68K type projects would also work although not the
commercial CompuPro or Cromemco 68K boards.
Thanks and have a nice day!
Andrew Lynch
sorry to post offtopic, but I know we have a few apple users here, and I
was hoping for some insigts into taking an powermac g5 2,7ghz dual
apart, I brough it home last week along with an g4 quicksilver 2002. So
we still a few years to go for them.
The powermac g5 is running very hot on the memory controler heatsink u3,
but it seem that part is actual placed on the backside of the mainboard,
and cooled by a heatpipe that connects to the aluminium case, but as its
running at 65 to 76 degree celsius, I am a bit worried.
Regards Jacob Dahl Pind
Hi,
what exactly is a Mohawk Data Sciences (MDS) Series 21? There's almost
nothing on the net about that system apart from one small article in the
July 1978 issue of Computer. Is it worth saving?
Christian
