shirsch

Can anyone point me to the software and documentation for the ATR8000 8088 add-on board? I've found only the Kaypro support in the wild. On a related subject, I have reverse-engineered the PLD used on later Copower-88 adapter boards (the one that plugs into the Z80 socket). If this is of interest please PM me?

Interesting thread! I have two Copower-88 board sets here and an ATR-8000. The ATR was from a different source than the CP88s and I don't think either of them were actually connected to one. Currently trying to troubleshoot the boards on a Kaypro CP/M machine. To help figure things out I'm going to start with a disassembly of the CP/M application that boots the board into MS-DOS. Would love to hear from anyone with a CP88 who's delved down into either the hardware of software. I did find a schematic of the CP and it was very helpful to understand how it communicates with the host. One of the CP88 boards will let me setup a ramdisk on it, so something is alive. Attempts at booting MS-DOS result in "Bad or missing command interpreter". I suspect the ATR CP/M utilities are similar.

I spent 20+ years at IBM writing and maintaining design-rule checkers for VLSI data sets. "Tape out" was still a commonly used term to denote release to manufacturing, along with "RIT" (release in technology). Your estimates for mask build are definitely in the ballpark, which is why we'd typically spend weeks analyzing designs for layout rule violations (DRC) and accurate correspondence with the circuit netlist (LVS). The last few generations of CMOS technology rely heavily on short-wave light diffraction and interference patterns to draw the tiny features during lithography. This introduced a lot of constraints in not only _what_ you can draw but in its periodicity and orientation. IBM used their own graphics language "GL1" for many years (complete with EBCDIC text encoding :-)), then switched to GDSII, which was in relatively common use until the early 2000s. By the time I moved on it had been replaced by OASIS, which is more expressive and has many ways to keep file sizes smaller. It is indeed unlikely that any fab would be able to simply build a working chip from 40 year old physical data. Assuming schematics or RTL descriptions are available, you'd be better off synthesizing it for FPGA. Given access to the appropriate software tools (at $50-100k per seat) and skill set it might be possible to migrate (shrink) the design to a modern technology. But the total costs would be astronomical, so discussing this is an intellectual exercise at best.

How am I just noticing this thread now? I have an original Atari interface (courtesy of Curt some years back) and now that I'm retiring will probably have the time to bring it up. Did either of these projects (reissue of Corvus board and/or Integrator) ever see the light of day?

Can someone point me to a downloadable copy of the support and driver utilities for a Supra SCSI adapter? Google turns up nothing but ICD utilities and I'm of the impression that they are not compatible with the Supra hardware.

Did you make any progress towards a working ATR8000 system disk? I have one here just waiting for the proper software.

Curt, Do you have anyone who can run that through an LVS tool to derive the netlist? With a proper netlist, synthesis into an FPGA should be relatively straightforward to do. I doubt any existing fab could build usable masks from that layout - too many technology changes over the past 25-30 years.

I have an 800XL with the same upgrade. Unfortunately, it and/or the computer is defective. The computer will nominally boot with the switch at either extreme, but is dead in the middle setting. In none of the settings do any of the special functions seem to be active. When switched down, the computer drops to a diagnostic menu with no drive attached. In the up position, it never shows the diagnostics. Since all the part numbers are filed off, I don't know where to start in diagnosis. For starters, if someone could scan the manual for me, that would be greatly helpful. I dropped a note to Bob Puff, but he is not sure he has any anymore and definitely didn't have an electronic copy. Um....post 9 in this thread will point you to what you are looking for. Thanks! Bob Puff claims that this unit is not an Ultraspeed Plus. He mentioned something about XL-Fix and said he was never involved with it. I'm confused. My unit is exactly as shown in the JPEGs attached to the post above. What is it exactly? The computer seems to boot and go through the motions with the switch at either extreme, but in no case do any of the hot keys do anything at all. Does anyone have information on the XL-Fix? Schematic? Troubleshooting information? Just trying to figure out what I have here and how I might get it working.

I have an 800XL with the same upgrade. Unfortunately, it and/or the computer is defective. The computer will nominally boot with the switch at either extreme, but is dead in the middle setting. In none of the settings do any of the special functions seem to be active. When switched down, the computer drops to a diagnostic menu with no drive attached. In the up position, it never shows the diagnostics. Since all the part numbers are filed off, I don't know where to start in diagnosis. For starters, if someone could scan the manual for me, that would be greatly helpful. I dropped a note to Bob Puff, but he is not sure he has any anymore and definitely didn't have an electronic copy.