Month: March 2017

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VCF East This Weekend!

If you’re anywhere near New Jersey this weekend, be sure to stop by Vintage Computer Festival East (VCFe)!  It’s a three day event, and we’ll be set up inside on Saturday and Sunday.  I always have things on sale for VCF so if you’re nearby and about to place a web order, come out and buy at the discount this weekend.

I’ll have both 6800 and 6809 SS-50 systems set up, along with two KIM-1s using various Corsham Tech products.  Each year there seems to be at least one person who has never touched a KIM-1 before so I’ll open up The First Book of KIM, point to a good program, let them key it in, and then enjoy watching their effort pay off when they run the program.  It may be only six seven-segment LEDs, but when a program like Lunar Lander or Farmer Brown are running, that old computer is still amazing.

If there’s anything in particular you’d like to see at the show, drop me an email so I can bring it along.

 

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6530 Replacement Boards Available

We now have an inventory of the KIM-1 6530 Replacement Boards available, either as a bare board, kit, or fully assembled.

Have a KIM-1 with a defective 6502-002 (U2) or 6530-003 (U3)?  If so, this board solves your problem and makes your KIM operational again!  Just set the three jumpers to indicate which chip is being replaced, remove the old chip, and plug in this new board.  It contains all the original I/O ports, RAM, timers and ROM contents as the original chip.

This is our first kit, so if you’re comfortable with a soldering iron, this is a quick project to build.  Or, there is always the bare PC board or even the fully assembled and tested version.

We’ll definitely have one of these on display at VCF East  April 1-2, 2017.

See  the product information page for ordering information.

 

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SS-30 Super Serial Board

One of my lost projects is the dual port, high speed serial card for the SS-30 bus, which was requested by a number of people working on porting OS/9 and other more advanced OSes.  The original design kind of worked, but not well enough, so a lot of time has been spent trying to identify all the subtle issues.  Rev 1 is not good enough to sell, but provided a good test platform.  The current working version of a rev 2 board on the bench:

It features a PC16552D serial chip, each of the two channels can go to at least 115,200  baud.  This chip was meant to interface to Intel CPUs so the bus signals don’t line up exactly with older Motorola CPUs, requiring a bit more external logic, such as the chip dead-bugged onto one beneath it.

Schematics and PC board designs were updated with the changes but have not been manufactured yet:

It’s all hand-routed, so little clean-ups take place every day.  There still seems to be one problem but it’s looking like a pure SI (signal integrity) issue caused by the long chunks of jumper wire with the latest fixes.  A bit more testing of the interrupt handling needs to be done, then new boards can be ordered.  Maybe they’ll be ready for VCF East.