18 Nov
2007
18 Nov
'07
8:47 p.m.
dwight elvey wrote:
The FDC board has two 34 pin connectors... labelled 0 and 1. One
connector for each of the two floppy drives. I thought that a perculiar
arrangement, as one connector should be able to support 2 to 4 drives.
Both floppy drives are configured as drive 0.
No other (HD) connectors on the floppy interface board.
As for the boot rom, my EPROM programmer hasn't been hooked up in
some time, so I don't have a quick and easy means to dump it at the moment.
It has a label "BOOT V1.1" on it... but not like that is particularly
'descriptive'
I'm sure if enough internal information was available, this could be
made into
a small general purpose computer... it has enough guts... a type of
display, an
FDC interface, 128K of memory, a CPU, etc... but w/o the keyboard, and
w/o those docs... pretty much I'd imagine it would be a difficult
proposition
(one that even with those docs I'd imagine would not really be worth the
effort).
Too bad it wasn't a computer that ran an OS like CP/M or something... when I
get the pics up somewhere I'll post a URL.... I really admire it's funky
'old' look.
-- Curt
From: cclist
at sydex.com
On 18 Nov 2007 at 11:00, Curtis H. Wilbar Jr. wrote:
It sure would be overkill unless it was to be used with some
non-standard format. If there are some WD chips on the
board, it might be a combination board as you suggest.
Still I suspect a special format.
Dwight
3 large chips on the FDC board...
N8X305I
N8X330N
N8X320N
Signetics bipolar microcontroller stuff. Very interesting in that the
8x330 is used--it's the floppy controller of the series; you don't
run across them very much. It's designed to interface with the 8x300
series and nothing else.
The 8x320 is the register array usually used to interface the 8x300
to external systems. You should probably find some bipolar RAM and
ROM there also as well as some I/O ports (8T32/8T36).
What makes this unusual is that it's found on an 8085 system with
5.25" floppies rather than a traditional MOS FDC. Were this only for
floppies, this definitely would have been a ridiculously expensive
implementation for the time (and power-hungry). However, I wonder if
that board doesn't also have a hard disk interface connector (e.g.
SA4000) which would have been right for the time--and made sense.
Is there an EPROM for the 8085 on the main board? If so, have you
dumped it? It might clinch the identification.
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