> But, the 5150 only has five slots.
> Video
> FDC
> Serial
> Parallel
On Wed, 9 Jul 2014, Tony Duell wrote:
MDA there? Thhat gives you a parallel port _and_
mono video.
True!
I started off with CGA, simply because the IBM monochrome monitor was
not cheap, and old used B&W video monitors were. (CCTV, Sony AV and CV
Sure. And sometimes having a graphics dispaly was more important that
clearer text.
However, you can have both the MDA and CGA cards in the same machine,
even in a 5150. If you're going to take up a slot to provide
a printerport, you might as well put an MDA card there, which will give you
said printer prot and a mono display output. You can have the CGA as
well, and use that as the default display if you want to.
> Joystick
I couldn't resist a analog to digital converter, even without joysticks.
Yes, IBM had a different name ("Analog Input Adapter"?) and didn't call it
"joystick".
I thought it was the 'Game Control Adapter' or soemthing like that.
I played with it with CDS photocells long enough to
realize that it
did not have enough bits of resolution to make a decent enlarging meter,
nor enlarger color balance meter.
IIRC, it was just a set of 555-like monostables (actually a 558, which is
effectively a chip containing 4 555 times wired as monostables). The
joystick pot is the timing resisotr (there is probably a series resisotor
on the card) and there's an timing capacitor.Bascially, software triggers
it, starts counitng up, and stops when the monostable times out.
I am not sure what resolution you could get if you wrote your own
software (ie. how high a count you could get with the standard
components), but possibly if you tweaked the R's and C's on the board you
might get enough resolution to read out an LDRR for this
In the IBM manual that I had at the time, there was a drawing that
was obviously the Radio Shack Color Computer joystick, although that
called for some trivial rewiring.
Not just a plug change[1]. The CoCo joystick inputs are genunie voltage
inputs, the joystick pot uses all 3 terminals. Track wired across the 5V
supply, slider to the input. The IBM (and Apple ][) joysticks are varable
resisotrs, betwee nthe +5V line and the input. It is, of course, tricial
to rewire the Radio Shack joystick when you realise this.
[1] as an aside, one of my favourit cartons shows a chap handing over a
car radio for reapir. The caption is 'I think it needs a plug change and
the valves ground in'
Somewhere I have a fairly high end joystick for the Apple ][ which uses
all 3 termianls of the pots and uses said pots to control currnet sources
that are fed into the Apple inputs. Give the operation of the 558
(discharge the capacitor, wait for it to reach a certain voltage), I
think this would work very well. It would obviosuly also work with the
IBM Game Cotnrol Adapter
To have
more than 64K total RAM, you would have to give one of those up,
go to "multifunction" (aftermarket) cards, upgrade to the "NEW!"
5150
(that supports 256K of RAM on the planar (IBM never called it
"motherboard" due to use of the word "mother..." by the Panthers at
Merritt College)), OR, . . .
I thought there was an IBM Planar that used 4164 DRAMs .
Yes, the original was 16K to 64K, using 4116s.
What I called the "NEW!" 5150 used 4164s, to provide 64K to 256K.
5160s used 4164s, to provide 64K to 256K, but some?/all? could be
trivially modified to use two rows of 41256 plus two rows of 4164, to
provide 640K.
AFAIK all could. Certainly the oldest schematic I've seen in the TechRef
shows the necessary parts fo the modification (the socket for the 74S158,
etc). Later on, IBM actually seem to ahve sold a 256K-640K Planar for the
5160 (which is, of course, the smae board, wit hthe 74S158 soldered in,
pads E1 and E2 jumpered, anf the approrpatie RAMs fitted). Ar at least my
Techref has an entire set of schemaitcs for it (which are almost
identical to the previous pages coverign the 64K-256K planar).
Nwo, IIRC, pads E3 and E4 o nthe 5160 planar were also a jumper on an
input of the RAM mampping PROM. So there are actally 4 pssible memory
cofigurations -- the 2 we all know about (4 rows of 64K chisp, 2 rows
of 256K, 2 rows of 64K) and 2 othes. I think one of those was to have 4
rows of 16K chips (4816s) for a 16K-64K XT Planar. I can't remmber wha
the last one was. Something like 32K rows???
-tony