7 Jun
2014
7 Jun
'14
3:59 a.m.
The FTS-88 was
a typical 1980-ish CP/M-86 machine running on an 8088
There is very little that's typical about the FTS-88 IMHO. For one thing
it has an optional GPIB por and an optional network port (their own standard) But the really odd thing is the video display. The
video RAM does not
appear in the memory map. To access it you use one of the channels of the
DMA controller. To write data to video RAM you use the DMA chip to read
the data from normal memory. This data is then written to locations in
video memory by hardawre on the video board. Very odd.
I'd forgotten that!
Another odd feacture: for dext display modes, it used a character set
that was loaded into the character generator RAM (not ROM), usually at
boot, but at other times too if you so wished. A friend and I created a
boot disk with a russian replacing the usual ASCII characters...
(although I
have an 8086 processor card for it), built in monitor,
separate 8-inch disk drives that were always going wrong.
The drives were standard Mitsubishi units, standard Shugart interface.
Perhaps I've bene lucky, but they don't seem to be particularly unreliable.
The main problem with these machines seems to be the
internal video
monitor (whcih is spproximately MDA rates, an MDA monitor can be hooked
up exernally). The oroginal monitors (there are various different
manufacturers/models) all seem to eat flyback transformers.
Yes, that too. I ended up hooking up an MDA monitor. This worked
pretty well, even in 132 column mode. (Yes, the text display had 132
column mode)
Philip.