From: "Dwight K. Elvey" <dwight.elvey at amd.com>
Sent: Monday, June 13, 2005 7:12 PM
From:
"river" <river at zip.com.au>
Hi,
Thanks for your replies. I found the relevant information.
I have an extensive inventory and can source the parts and get this poor,
battered
board back to its old self again. However, looking through the
doco I
noticed that the 8800B requires a display/control and interface boards. A
question for those of you that own a MITS8800 - does it need those boards
for a
turnkey system? Can I plug the CPU board into the backplane and run it
without
the d/c and i/f cards, assuming I set up the ROM and RAM cards for the
system?
If not, (since I do not have the d/c and i/f cards) I'll have to try and
build
them from the cct diagrams I have obtained. This is do-able (but a lot of
work)
if I can get my hands on some blank S100 w/wrap boards, but I noticed
there's a
1702 EPROM chip and I'd need to get the memory map for this chip to burn
my own.
Failing that, and it's all too hard and bothersome for me, is there anyone
that
would need a repaired 8800 CPU card for trade or anything similar?
rgds
river
Hi
It should work on a turnkey. Almost everything goes
through the S100 bus. Only the direct connect of the
data bus goes directly between the panel and the CPU board.
I don't think that is needed. You will have to have code
residing at address 0000. This is not common. Most
expected a working front panel that could load a boot
address.
Some ROM boards have a way to be at 0000 after reset
and then switch to someplace else once things are booted.
Don't give up on it. When there is a will, there will
be a way.
Dwight
It is also easy to generate mwrite with a chip or chips glued upside down on
the CPU card with no "real" modification to the board. By no real
modification I mean no cutting of traces just solder tack a couple of wires.
I'll see about looking it up, many CPU boards have mwrite as an option.
Randy