5 Sep
2012
5 Sep
'12
2:56 p.m.
On Sep 5, 2012, at 12:39 AM, dwight elvey wrote:
Hi
I just picked up an interesting item from WeirdStuff. It seems
to be an 8X8 grid with magnetic reed switches, a 68K processor
on a proto board.
It had a 4 digit LCD display ( that was broken ), 128K bytes of RAM,
128K of ROM, a clock crystal and assorted parts.
I'm wondering if it was a prototype for soem game system or maybe
some project from some magazine? Does anyone know of such
a magazine project?
Who ever built it had access to HP parts. The proto board is gold
plated and it has 1820-0976 parts on it ( 4015B ).
Not the kind of thing you see often.
I've not tried to power on yet. I have another similar display but
I don't know if the pins are the same.
One of the keypad switches is broken and missing parts.
I believe the keys marked P, N, K, B, R and Q would indicate the
intent was in fact Chess.
Dwight
I'm not sure if it's related, but my wife has a "computerized"
chess game which has magnets in the bottoms of the pieces. It
was her father's, and it looks to be about 68k vintage, but I'm
prohibited from opening it up. :-) We just use it as a regular
chess board, since we're cheapskates.
It's called "Gambit", which of course is quite difficult to find
on Google because if you search for "chess" and "gambit", the
results are all about chess gambits (and the five hundred other
computer chess programs called "Gambit").
- Dave