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acadiel

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Posts posted by acadiel

  1. Posted · Edited by acadiel

    There was another ROM version for the TI Controller (the Guion mod). See attached and unarchive. There should be a README.

     

    Permission from the creator's father:

     

    I hereby give my permission to copy the code of my son,

    John P. Guion, as used in the Texas Instruments Disk

    Controller modifications. It may be copied for personal

    use only and may not be sold, resold or used in a

    product for sale. In other words I grant this license

    for free and I expect the fruits of using the code to

    be, likewise, free.

     

    Louis I. Guion

    Dallas, Texas

    June 10, 2001

    JPG_Prom.exe.zip

  2. Posted

    I'm thrilled that there are 500+ cartridge boards out there now and they are being used for stuff like this.... shows you that our community is far from being dead!!!

     

    500+ TI cartridge boards? I'd say that's way, way, way, way low. Unless thousands of people have filled up thousands of trash cans

    with them. Remember, there were an estimated 2 million consoles built. A conservative estimate would be 5 cartridges produced for every console. Do the math on that, but the question is "How many are left?"

     

    I'm talking about the Guidry cartridge boards here :)

  4. Posted

    I just bought one of these on eBay, and boy, someone was fighting me for it... drove up the price pretty high.. ugh :P

     

    I want it to study it and learn how the logic chips are emulating GROM - I know Tursi and others have FPGAs and stuff to do that, but I want to learn from the ground up; otherwise I never will. :)

    • Like 1

  5. Posted

    Prototype boards came in today and I built the first one. It passes the "smoke test", i.e. it does not smoke, the regulators are making correct voltages, and the oscillator is putting out a nice 50.02MHz signal. I hope to have a chance tomorrow to to get it programmed and tested. In the mean time, here are a few photos for anyone still interested.

     

    Nice!!!!!

  6. Posted

     

    I would not do that unless you are set up and practiced at circuit board rework. These old boards are a pain to work on without causing board damage, and you are talking about a *lot* of chips. Unless all the chips are socketed? Can you post some pictures of the board? It is better to troublshoot the board, find the bad part, and replace it. Again, I have the tools to do that, and if I can't fix it, you are no worse off.

     

    (P.S. I do not see a private messages button on site)

     

    All the ones in mine are socketed. In fact, there were some .3 16 pin "spare slots", I'm guessing for some of the 74LS chips that John Guion might have thought would go bad (and that you would want spares for).

     

    IIRC, make sure the battery is good first, and load the DSR (i.e. "initialize the card"). A picture is here: http://www.mainbyte.com/ti99/hardware/peb/pgram.html

  7. Posted

    The PGRAM+ isn't that too terribly complicated - shouldn't take that much to fix it. Just a bunch of 74LS chips as well as some 32Kx8 and 8Kx8 lower power SRAMs that house the GRAM and the DSR.

     

    It would probably really be inexpensive to buy new SRAMs on Mouser or somewhere else and drop them in to see if it fixes the issue. If not, most of the 74LS chips should be easy to find.

  8. Posted

    I vaguely remember there being many different versions of the Print Shop for the IIe... I know there's the original Print Shop (B&W, doesn't seem to support the ImageWriter II that I have), but wasn't there another IIe version that did support the color ribbon in the Imagewriter II?

     

    I'm really looking for that version...I don't know what it's called, but all the disk images that I've transferred to the IIe via ADT that have been called "Print Shop" are identical to the original that I have from the mid 80's - the one that doesn't work in color.

     

    Thanks :)

  11. Posted

    The power *PLUG* (the part connected to the power cord) is a standard 5.5mm(OD) x 2.1mm(ID) positive tip (inside is positive).

     

    That helps me out. I'll buy a new jack (yes, the jack inside the unit is broken) from Mouser that's 5.5mm (OD) and 2.1mm (ID).

     

    Thanks, Matthew!!

  15. Posted

    I vaguely remember some programs you could load but not list or save - even BEFORE a run. Forget what it would do, but it wasn't good

     

    Bill Gronos had written some ingenious stuff in the Disk Fixer manual that talked about hex modifications to XB programs that would basically lock out or corrupt the machine if you tried to LIST or SAVE it after unprotecting it.

     

    There were other programs, like DiskIt (Maple Leaf Software) that would read from CS1 and save as a PROGRAM file for you - either XB or assembly. No matter if it was protected or not. :-)

  17. Posted

    Thanks Tim. I had a great time watching you and Marc trying to get that Geneve code working too. ;) Oh, I finished the whole 38/58/9999 cores last night after the pub crawl, and threw in the 9900 core too in my spare time. Boards will be ready tomorrow.

     

    Matthew

     

    Can I have fries with that? :D

  21. Posted

    I keep meaning to put a link to it on my site.. along with Arcturus. :)

     

    Probably will put Miner 2049er and Espial up there as well.

     

    BTW, one interesting bit of trivia about these carts that plugged into the side. They mapped themselves to the 32K memory expansion memory addresses (>2000 and >A000)

  25. Posted

     

    As for collaborating with people, I'd love to, but I think my approach to some of this is a lot different than what others want to do right now. General implementation ideas make for great conversation, and anyone wanting to do a PLD version of new hardware, just raise your hand and say "let's do it!"

     

    I can't wait for the Faire to be able to talk to everyone in a single place. As far as I know most of us working on new hardware will be there.

     

    Matthew

     

    I'd like to eventually see the cart board to morph in a version of a super Gram Kracker... or have a new piece of hardware that would:

     

    1) Be in a standard cart case

    2) Support multiple GROM bases and up to at least 128K of bank switched ROM (inverted/noninverted switchable) per "cartridge"

    3) Have a selectable built in menu, that'll read files from a pre-built index off of a micro SD card (you'd have a program on the PC/Mac that would take the ROM/GROM images, put them in a particular place in flash, and update the index)

    4) Have some RAM (like the Super carts, MBX carts, etc.)

     

    Just for kicks and grins, I wonder how much PLD work would be needed to reconstruct the old Gram Kracker, PGram, or Gramulator.

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