Got that INS8073 SBC to respond!

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(a)amanda.spole.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html