IBM 6360 - interface help?

[Anders Nelson]

CCing the list back in, and still looking for someone in the NY area with a
Displaywriter (with disk drive) that could help me take some logic traces -

====

Quoth Nigel:

just in case you missed it your reply only went to me.

On Mon, Apr 22, 2019 at 1:45 PM Anders Nelson <anders.k.nelson at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Nigel - Wow, very cool! I assume you dumped a ROM feeding an 8048 inside
the 6360 drive housing?

Someone dumped the original ROM, it is in the github repo too.

> FWIW, I also found a Displaywriter withOUT keyboard or disk drive:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-1984-IBM-6580-Display-Station-Word-Processor-and-Monitor/303132621814

If you want a 6580 keyboard you either have to get lucky or outbid the
mech-heads...be prepared to bid a lot though. Estate sales are the
thing to haunt to get one intact.

====

Thanks Nigel, more below!

--
Anders Nelson

+1 (517) 775-6129

www.erogear.com


On Sun, Apr 21, 2019 at 11:45 PM Anders Nelson <anders.k.nelson at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Nigel - Wow, very cool! I assume you dumped a ROM feeding an 8048 inside
> the 6360 drive housing?
>
> I agree a logic dump would be invaluable so if I can get in front of a DW
> I'll capture and share all I find on my blog (and wherever else).
>
> Al - I found a USB conversion kit for this keyboard and it's all
> open-source, so by reversing the key-matrix decode step in the kit's MCU
> firmware we might be able to feed the original keyboard controller with
> keystrokes from, say, another USB keyboard. A very roundabout hack but it
> seems these keyboards are rare. Here are the conversion kit sources:
>
> Forum: https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=58138.0
> Direct: http://downloads.cornall.co/ibm-capsense-usb/
>
> Any chance someone knows the original keyboard controller pinout and
> protocol?
>
> FWIW, I also found a Displaywriter withOUT keyboard or disk drive:
> https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-1984-IBM-6580-Display-Station-Word-Processor-and-Monitor/303132621814
>
> =]
> --
> Anders Nelson
>
> +1 (517) 775-6129
>
> www.erogear.com
>
>
> On Sun, Apr 21, 2019 at 11:12 PM Nigel Williams <
> nw at retrocomputingtasmania.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi Anders,
>>
>> good luck with your exploration of the 6360.
>>
>> Back in Jan-2017, I assisted Sergey who did the MAME implementation of
>> the Displaywriter, as Al Kossow mentioned in an earlier email the code
>> is here:
>>
>>
>> https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/97b67170277437131adf6ed4d60139c172529e4f/src/mame/machine/ibm6580_fdc.cpp
>>
>> During this process I started disassembling the 6360, attached is a
>> file that I developed with comments. It is incomplete but might help
>> understand the protocol.
>>
>> One thing to keep in mind is that the Displaywriter is made up of
>> (almost) standalone subsystems, so the floppy drive unit has its own
>> 8048 microprocessor and accepts high-level commands from the system
>> unit.
>>
>> Sergey and I were chatting about returning to work on the MAME
>> Displaywriter implementation at some point. We really need a
>> logic-analyser dump of the startup since it is very convoluted (it has
>> a large section of code attempting to check that all the hardware is
>> working so it is doing all manner of tricks to check things).
>>
>> cheers,
>> nigel.
>> www.retroComputingTasmania.com
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Apr 1, 2019 at 6:42 AM Anders Nelson via cctalk
>> <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>> > Can anyone help with the protocol?
>>
>