expansion port 130XE

[Thelen]

what can be done with the expansion port of a 130XE ? are there devices for, or homebrew devices ?, for what was it made ?

 

thelen

[geosteve]

I don't know of anything made for it. I've owned a 130XE since it came out, 1985, and never heard of it's purpose.

 

By the way...still got it...still works

[Albert]

There weren't very many devices produced to take advantage of the expansion port on the 130XE. The same interface also exists on the 800XL (it's the PBI, I think, Paralllel Bus Interface). I ran a BBS on an Atari 800XL and had a MIO board plugged into this interface. It was from ICD, and MIO stood for Multi Input Output. It had a parallel port, two high-speed (for an Atari 8-bit) serial ports, an a hard disk interface (MFM? I don't recall). It also contained either 1MB or 256K of memory, which you could configure between RAM disks and a printer buffer. It also had a built-in BIOS from which you could configure it. Awesome piece of hardware, and I'm still looking for one to replace the one I was using to run a BBS many years ago.

 

I'm not sure what other peripherals take advantage of this expansion. Perhaps the Black Box from CSS? Let me take a look.. Yes, it also uses this port. Here is the Black Box Homepage, and I believe you can still purchase these. It performs a similar function to the MIO.

 

..Al

[+rdemming]

There weren't very many devices produced to take advantage of the expansion port on the 130XE.  The same interface also exists on the 800XL (it's the PBI, I think, Paralllel Bus Interface).

 

The expansion bus on the XE is NOT the same as the one on the XL. The PBI on the XL has all CPU line's etc. where as the XE one has only the CPU lines missing on the cartridge port. So to have to same functionality of the XL PBI you have to use the XE expansion port + the XE cartridge port.

 

A german company made the "Turbo Freezer" which pluged into the expansion bus. It had a button which would 'freeze' the running application. Then you could disassemble, save and change the memory contents. You could also load a saved 'program state' and continue running from the point where you saved it. It was similar to the C64 final/turbo/power cartridges.

 

I've myself a XL version but there was also a XE version.

 

Regards,

 

Robert