Jump to content

Ksarul

+AtariAge Subscriber
  • Posts

    7,874
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    7

Ksarul last won the day on January 20 2023

Ksarul had the most liked content!

3 Followers

About Ksarul

Profile Information

  • Gender
    Male

Recent Profile Visitors

The recent visitors block is disabled and is not being shown to other users.

Ksarul's Achievements

Quadrunner

Quadrunner (9/9)

9.1k

Reputation

  1. Digging around, I found some additional data on Heiner Martin's board (I received it from @Flottmann1 a while back) which might come in useful. I think the file describing the Type 2 board was a translation I did quite a while back. . . I also included images of an EGROM board with Advertizer on it for comparison, along with the Advertizer manual, which is relatively hard to find. Note that this weird TI cartridge does NOT show up on the title screen--it just adds a bunch of routines to TI BASIC. heiner_cartridge.pdf Heiner Martin Cartridge Board-Type 2 (English).pdf Advertiser.pdf
  2. My question there is: Since when did I agree to be your employee and why aren't you paying me for the "privilege" of performing said checkout work for you?
  3. The Logo II cartridge also came with a German manual, published in Switzerland in late 1984. I had never seen that book referenced anywhere, so it is one more for my bibliography of TI books. It also had a handful of other Logo books in German, but they weren't TI-specific (although some did reference it).
  4. They are not--but I provide bare (or assembled) boards for a very reasonable price (PM me).
  5. I just received one in the mail today built up as a TI writer cartridge with only English and German as selection options. . .along with a Logo II module in German--with real GROMs, so it was a qualification run cartridge. Interesting that I received one of each type of TI proto along with a fully built-up Heiner Martin board the day after I posted some data about the various types of cartridge boards. . .LOL
  6. Oddly enough, TI actually made and sold GROM simulation cartridge boards to developers (EGROM boards). I have a pair of the bare boards squirreled away somewhere. A lot of the true prototype cartridges in the wild are also built on these boards. Mr. Martin's board was definitely an outgrowth of those TI boards, as one of the most common modules built on them were the Advertizer cartridges circulating in Germany. Most other cartridges identified as prototypes are actually from qualification runs (100-150 examples in a run) made to test the production equipment and parts before initiating full production. I have a couple dozen of this type, but only 3-4 of the ones built on the EGROM boards.
  7. And I stayed with Thru-hole parts so that the boards could pretty much be assembled by anyone with a bit of soldering skill. The PLCC flash chip was a design decision based on a chance buy of a couple of thousand of the flash chips I used on the board for an insanely low price (bought sometime before I ever started working on the board with Tursi and Jon). I've used most of those up over the years for this and other projects, but they were a definite motivator. The plethora of options are the result of our brainstorming sessions and the desire to make the board do pretty much anything it could do without the designer having to resort to board surgery. We met that goal. . .and it was a definite team effort from beginning to end. I had a similar parts-epiphany when I found a whole bunch of 27C4000 EPROM chips (512Kx8) for about 30 cents each. Almost nothing out there can program them--but a few programmers will program their 27C4001 sibling which uses the same programming algorithm. One IC adapter later, I can program them on one of my programmers (the other one that says it can program the 27C4001s fails, but the BK Precision 844 works fine) and a few minor mods to the 512K red boards later and I can use them at will (current Red boards have this capability built-in). It is for weird experiments like this that I have 7-8 different EPROM programmers. . . Last but not least, a major shout out to Tursi for writing the software that made these boards so versatile. There is actually a pretty steady demand for the boards, as they are a completely different use-case than the FinalGROM or the various GRAM solutions. Sometimes, you just need that purpose-built cartridge, and the Blue boards with Tursi's wonderful software implementation meet that need quite well.
  8. The complete explanation for how it works is in an early issue of TI-Revue.
  9. You might want to contact mdude on eBay, as he seems to be the last source of NOS HexBus peripherals out there.
  10. So which prototype TI cards are in the odd PEB? It would be interesting to see if any of them are cards we haven't otherwise seen in the wild lately.
  11. Here is a set of complete schematics for the board--to include the connections for the ribbon cable to the 9918A socket. . .I did these in Visio, so they should be nice and clear, no matter how much you blow them up. The A3 size is close to the North American 11x17 size. . .so it is already a useful size without blowing it up. A3-Mechatronic 80-Column Card-P1.pdf A3-Mechatronic 80-Column Card-P2.pdf
  12. A couple of useful items to note. Original TI cartridges used two different types of read-only memory: ROMs, which are easily replaced by EPROMs, and GROMs, which are a TI-specific memory type. Each TI GROM chip contains 6K of programming data in a specialized language called GPL, with the chip occupying a single address on the bus and autoincrementing an internal 13-bit address counter on the chip (but all GROMs on the bus increment at the same time, so there is a bit of complexity there). There are layouts for EPROM-only cartridges available for anyone to use (the 64K Guidry boards posted on hexbus.com). There are also 128K EPROM-only boards that work like the 64K-Guidry boards (available from me or @arcadeshopper), 512K and 2048K versions that use a different bank-stacking mode (Guidry-type boards are an inverted stack, all others use a non-inverted bank stacking mode). In addition, there are UberGROM boards that allow you to replicate the functionality of both memory chip types (512K EPROM and 120K GROM). I produce all of the boards except the 64K Guidry boards, and all are also available through @arcadeshopper. Note also that there are options available that don't require you to permanently burn a set of files into silicon. If you are working with ROM-only data, there is the FlashROM99 board, and if you need ROM/GROM functionality, there is the Final GROM board. You can get either of these from @arcadeshopper or several other online sources.
  13. I kept my "smart" TV fully isolated from the Internet for much of its life, until She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed and my older son (not Turtles) decided they wanted to use it with Netflix. It was relatively easy to keep it isolated too: it required an Internet connection to set it up (why?), so I did so, but then immediately changed the password on my router so that the one stored in the TV went nowhere. That kept me from getting some really obnoxious Samsung updates that would have negatively affected my use of the device I'd paid for. Luckily, the Netflix phase has passed and I was able to isolate it once more, but I have serious issues with companies trying to usurp my control of devices or applications I've paid for. HP with their new "ink subscription" services that you can't opt out of and their patently illegal bricking of printers for using third-party inks. My printer, my ink, my choice. Microsoft with their increasingly strident attempts to force logons away from local accounts and funnel them into the online Microsoft ecosystem. They didn't buy my computer--I did. They don't get to decide how I will use it, even if the OS is one they produced. It was still relatively easy to avoid that quagmire when installing Windows 10, but the procedures to do the same with Windows 11 are much more complicated and are really only in the OS at all to satisfy the requirements of Enterprise customers, as the straight consumer versions make it nearly impossible to avoid. I suspect the next version won't even let you download the software onto your new machine without the Microsoft control links already being in place (as physical media have reached the point of being deprecated "dinosaur" fodder). I don't carry a cell phone either, as the ability to track my activities without my permission is a greater risk than I am willing to accept. Unfortunately, cars (a technology I do need, unlike cell phones) are reaching to point of complexity where similar levels of unwanted connectedness are becoming the norm. When the medicines I take start transmitting results back to the doctors that prescribed them, I'll have yet another technology to avoid. My TI doesn't do any of those things--making it a perfectly useful device in my eyes. It is a lesson many modern devices need to heed. . .and emulate.
  14. One important note on keyboards: brown circuit card=mylar matrix=not likely to work anymore, NOS or not. Green circuit card=individual keys=generally still in working condition. The key tops on mylar ones are also shaped differently: very square corners. All other types have somewhat rounded corners. . .
  15. Excellent sleuthing, @InsaneMultitasker!
×
×
  • Create New...