Do you happen to have any leads on the title? I searched for TMS9900 on
Amazon and I'm just getting back a few TI publications. Sounds like
something I'd like to have in my antiquarian EE/CS book collection if I can
find it :)
I know a lot of the "family" ICs are just there for convenience and that in
principle it's possible to hook up basically any LSI UART (or combination
of discrete parts equating to a UART) to any CPU given enough glue... but
since it's my first time through with the architecture, I want to keep it
simple if I can :) OTOH, I guess upping the challenge level a little bit
wouldn't kill me. ;)
As you note, I don't think the TMS9902 was even used in the TI99/4a; I
looked at some high-res board pics and couldn't make it out. I do have
other UARTs in my inventory i.e. 6551, 6850, 16550, etc.
I'm definitely looking forward to it... my TMS9995s should be here pretty
soon so I can start fooling around.
Best,
Sean
On Sun, Jan 4, 2015 at 7:42 AM, John Wallace <johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk>
wrote:
Dave Pitts' aforementioned page links to some 990
stuff at bitsavers. The
stuff there is largely system level stuff.
People whose interests are closer to chip level might want to have a look
at the 9900 Microprocessor Series Family Systems Design Databook available
at
archive.org, if they're not already aware:
https://archive.org/details/9900MicroprocessorSeriesFamilySystemsDesignData…
A 2 inch thick book that contained pretty much everything you were likely
to need to know about the 9900 family.
One of the few other useful 9900 resources I vaguely remember was a 3rd
party 9900 book which contained the source for an "instant input assembler"
- a tiny line by line assembler which you could add to your PROM-based 9900
debug monitor so you could enter small programs as source rather than hex.
Neat. Can't remember name of author or of book, can't quickly find them
either.
I worked with 990/4 systems many years ago and there was almost no 9900
family glue logic inside. As far as I remember, the /4 was designed before
(most of?) the 99xx support chips came to market. So a serial card in a /4
had a handful of chips doing what a 9902 would eventually do in one. Not
sure about the video controller but the same probably applied.
I have a vague recollection that the interweb has some decent writeups of
the innards of the 99/4 home computer stuff (sorry, no pointers); from
those, it might be possible to work out if the kit of parts on eBay is a
plausible match for a 99/4 or similar volume market product.
Have a lot of fun
John Wallace