Tiger Stripe CC-40

[curtis]

Picked this up from a fellow who worked on the software development side of the CC-40 and TI-74. Very interesting design, but horribly flawed.

 

Instead of the edge card cartridge there were contacts on the BOTTOM of the cartridge and a metal shift plate to hold it in place. To call it unreliable is like saying the wafertape was a brilliant piece of engineering. Yeah, it SUCKED.

 

Not only was the contact sketchy but it totally failed a static discharge test. Not sure about that. Just what I was told.

 

Anyway, as you can see it was a fairly late prototype given the plastic was already in the silver finish and it actually has a serial number(which is very hard to read!) and the overall look of a finished product.

 

The unit had a whopping 2K of memory! Another serious drawback.

 

Anyway, here are some shots of it.

 

The shot of the serial number and assembly date/location has funky colors due to the all aluminum casing and I had to tinker with the colors to get them visible.

 

Note also, there is nothing on the back side regarding the usual copyright legalese.

[ti99iuc]

Cery interesting, i never seen it before

[curtis]

Cery interesting, i never seen it before

It's the only one I've ever seen. And I've been looking for another one!

[+acadiel]

Would love to see internal pics... and pics of inside the cart if you can get to it without breaking it.

[+Ksarul]

Very interesting--and that is the first one I've seen like this as well. . .

[curtis]

Ask and ye shall receive!

 

Most people will quickly notice the clump of resistors around the hexbus socket aren't there. Guess they decided they needed to buffer the signals a bit.

 

The "dead bug" chip, I think is a memory decoding chip. Also the 2 sockets for additional memory. Fellow that gave it to me said it probably wouldn't accept the 8K chips in the regular 40. I tried and it didn't. So 2K it is.

 

 

 

[jrhodes]

Would it be a good idea to dump the system rom's and any of the modules you have?

There might be interesting goodies hiding in there compared to other revisions.

Edited August 28, 2018 by jrhodes

[curtis]

I'd be happy to dump the ROM's if someone could walk me through on how to do so.

[+acadiel]

I'd be happy to dump the ROM's if someone could walk me through on how to do so.

 

I think the biggest hurdle here is that unless you have a battery backed up RAM cart with the tiger stripes, our old way of dumping the BIOS won't work. Pasting the debug statement here for the 32K RAM cart in case you get ahold of one (or for Ksarul, who has a CC-40+ and needs to dump the main 32K ROM):

 

Debug:

 

52 03 88 CF FF 5B 88 EF FF 59 A3 FC 19 94 19

 

9A 59 9B 5B DB 59 DB 5B 7D FF 59 E6 F3 7D CF

 

58 E6 EE C2 5D FF E6 E0 F4

 

Load address: >2000; Execution Address: >2000

 

Result:

 

ROM Pg. 3 copied to >B000 - >CFFF

ROM Pg. 2 copied to >9000 - >AFFF

ROM Pg. 1 copied to >7000 - >8FFF

ROM Pg. 0 copied to >5000 - >6FFF

[curtis]

Yeah, no battery backed tiger stripe RAM Cart. I'd be willing to dump it to a Printer 80 if you can talk me through that process. I'd then just scan the print out and post it here or somewhere else more appropriate.

 

I think the biggest hurdle here is that unless you have a battery backed up RAM cart with the tiger stripes, our old way of dumping the BIOS won't work. Pasting the debug statement here for the 32K RAM cart in case you get ahold of one (or for Ksarul, who has a CC-40+ and needs to dump the main 32K ROM):

 

Debug:

 

52 03 88 CF FF 5B 88 EF FF 59 A3 FC 19 94 19

9A 59 9B 5B DB 59 DB 5B 7D FF 59 E6 F3 7D CF

58 E6 EE C2 5D FF E6 E0 F4

Load address: >2000; Execution Address: >2000

Result:

ROM Pg. 3 copied to >B000 - >CFFF
ROM Pg. 2 copied to >9000 - >AFFF
ROM Pg. 1 copied to >7000 - >8FFF
ROM Pg. 0 copied to >5000 - >6FFF

[+acadiel]

Yeah, no battery backed tiger stripe RAM Cart. I'd be willing to dump it to a Printer 80 if you can talk me through that process. I'd then just scan the print out and post it here or somewhere else more appropriate.

 

If we can get JGardner in here, I am betting he'd be the one that could do it. He helped me by writing the above assembly that copied it to the 32K. It would be pretty easy to read and print XX hex words per line on a Printer 80, and I'm pretty sure he would do it

[curtis]

 

If we can get JGardner in here, I am betting he'd be the one that could do it. He helped me by writing the above assembly that copied it to the 32K. It would be pretty easy to read and print XX hex words per line on a Printer 80, and I'm pretty sure he would do it

We're swapping regular emails while he's working on an A1C program so I'll talk to him about it.

[kl99]

hi, it might be enough to compare the print outs then against a printout of a default cc-40 to figure if the rom is different.

[curtis]

I had forgotten that I had attempted to upgrade the memory in this a while back. Managed to get 1 8K chip recognized so instead of 2K I now have a WHOPPING 10K!

 

Tried adding a second 8K chip and then things got really weird. Memory dropped back to a very odd 3K.

 

Think I'll stick with the 10K and be happy.