Unfortunately, the adoption of the IEEE696 standard was more or less, the cause of its demise. Whereas pre-696 board makers went to great lengths to make their products work with a range of CPU's, memory, FDC's, HDC's, I/O cards, etc, after the standard was adopted, these manufacturers used the standard as an excuse to ignore the others in the industry and the result was that interoperability suffered. If you want a current-generation computer with a useful front-panel display, you have to synthesize a single-step operation and dump the internals of the processor to the display hardware. Too much of the operation is packed inside the processor IC. If it's the front-panel you're after, and if you don't mind that the front panel needs to be shielded to meet FCC standards, as does the cabling you'll need, else you'll knock out all the broadcast TV reception in your neighborhood. Once that happens you'll have that ugly FCC van parked across your driveway. . . If you're bent on having an S-100 bus, it would work better to use an 8080 than a Z-80, as the S-100 signals were designed around an 8080. Most of the logic found on typical Z-80 cards for the S-100 is to regenerate those awkward and not terribly useful signals which Intel, Zilog, and others spent megabucks to eliminate so they'd be there to make the S-100 go. In this one respect, and recognizing the fact that hindsight is always 20-20, I'd say that Multibus-I was designed a lot better for general purpose computing. If you're really interested in running a "clever/new" S-100, you might try building a pod with which to emulate the 8080 processor from your PC. Old Intel documents will provide the desired timing, and I don't really think you need too fast a PC to emulate the old 8080 in real time. Writing the code to interpret the 8080 code correctly and produce the appropriate signal flow will show you definitely understand the workingsof the processor. You can even build a virtual front panel on your PC's CRT. Additionlly, you can run a window of "Hyperterminal" to support your need for a terminal with which to talk to the S-100 box as a console. I just took a look to see what I've got that would be interesting to integrate into a system on one of the big S-100 cardcages I've been hoping someone would take away. I must've hit my head . . . Dick -----Original Message----- From: John Ruschmeyer <jruschme(a)exit109.com> To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers <classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu> Date: Sunday, March 21, 1999 5:51 PM Subject: Re: Rebirth of IMSAI retro with discussion.