Hello All,
I recently acquired a Northstar Horizon machine that didn't have any memory boards. I
also received a Dynabyte 800589-G 64k dynamic RAM board. Unfortunately, there is no
documentation on this board (other than a single set of jumper settings for use in a
Dynabyte 5505 computer -
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/dynabyte/404512A_5505_Comp…
)
So far, I have the Northstar rebuilt (power supply tested, capacitors reconditioned, IC
legs cleaned, etc). I added the components to install a boot PROM on the Z80 CPU card,
and I can successfully boot up to a monitor ROM. From here, I can examine and deposit
memory and ports. From this, I can determine that I appear to have a problem with the
Dynabyte card, assuming I've reverse engineered the jumpers.
The jumpers allow me to enable/disable 4 banks of 16k at 0000,4000,8000,C000. I can either
have the bands be there on reset, or switch them on/off by setting/resetting bits in a
bank select port that can be defined.
I can successfully switch on/off banks from the monitor (visible with the LEDs on the
board, as well as seeing 00 or a random value instead of FF in the memory location).
However, when I try to write any value, I always write FF. Refresh appears to be working,
because any FF I deposit will stay there for hours.
This is really tough because I don't have a schematic for the memory board. Are there
any S100 experts that could point me in a direction to start looking? Port I/O is working
(to the serial port as well as to the bank select port). Memory read appears to work,
because I get values that are consistent (the RAM will sometimes boot up with random
values, and the random value will stay that way in that memory location until I attempt to
write anything to it, then it goes FF). It appears to be a write issue.
I've enabled a wait state on the CPU in case it was a timing issue, but no
difference.
I'd appreciate any suggestions on where I should put my logic probe :)
Image of the memory board here if interested:
http://www.broadbandpig.com/?attachment_id=51
Ian