Ksarul

No problem at all on timing--I understand the COVID problem from personal experience, as it cut nearly a month out of my life. It is one of the most unpleasant things I've ever had to deal with, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

This is a mighty interesting project. . .

Thanks for the reply--it is always a good thing to reconnect to the programmers who worked on things BITD. If you do find the source code for this one, that would be awesome!

I'm fine with an inital VGA-only release too. That said, do what you feel is right/want to do here and I'll support whatever you end up doing 100%.

In answer to the question, it effectively rolls the banks over, as you suspected @GDMike. This is because the card addressing only supports bank numbers from 0 to 255. As soon as you advanve your counter to 256, you are setting a higher-order bank bit than is decoded by the card--so that bit is ignored, but the rest of the bank address you are trying to set is still valid, setting the card back to bank 0. This process continues for each subsequent bank. Note that on a 4M card, two additional higher-order bits are decoded, and on a 16M card, all four of the higher-order bits of the 74LS612 are decoded. This has been tested on 4M boards (and since Classic99 supports a larger SAMS memory space, the functionality can also be verified there for the 16M SAMS space (or even 32M, since it supports a fifth high-order bit which doesn't exist on the 74LS612)).

I remember buying Chicken Helper from the IUG, way back when. . .

On DM3, most copies in circulation are prototypes (assembled on EGROM boards). There was a qualification run done near the end using actual GROM chips, but I have only seen a few survivors of the 150 or so made to do the qualification run. I have one, and I believe @acadielhas another one of the qualification units. The EGROM versions actually come in two variants: one with the standard title screen and one with a banner stating it was for the Dallas TI Engineering User's Group at the top, but which is otherwise identical to the others. Counting the qual unit, I have all three variants.

Yes, and then I obtained the complete rights to the board when Marc sold off his TI stuff last year. I plan on a new run of boards soon.

I still have plenty of bare boards available. I have an assembled board that I need to run through a shakedown test over the next day or two. I've been delayed over the last few weeks due to COVID-19 (it infected me and I avoided touching any of my hobby gear until I was sure I was fully clear)

Based on your smptoms, I would look at the signals between the disk controller chip and the disk connector. It looks like some of the control signals are making it through--but not all. I put the CorComp schematics up in the schematics thread last year (just find the one that matches your card), which will show you which signals show up on each pin.

Hey, my semi-feral kitties have totally adapted to me. They totally want to snuggle while I'm preparing food for them and generally want to hang out with me once they've eaten. I have thre that fit into that category, and three more that warily accept my presence. I got all of them spayed/neutered so that they could live happy lives without producing oodles of wild kittens. . .and the other three will eventually come into petting range too. As one of the buttons I found at Spencer's says: I'm here to pet all the f***ing cats.

I found the Tomy cartridge board files I made a while back--these are in ExpressPCB format. Tomy_Tutor_Cart_8K_16K_v1d.pcb Tomy_Tutor_Cart_32K_v3b.pcb

Mike Dudeck (Tex*in Treasures) bought out all of their stock a few years ago.

I can answer some of the questions. On BASIC and the Pyuuta, it requires a BASIC-1 cartridge (used only with the Pyuuta MK-II) or a BASIC-1 Adapter (attaches to the back of the Pyuuta, using a variation of the same case as the Game Adapter for the 3D games). I have a set of the multicarts that I purchased for my systems a while back, but I haven't seen them available in a while. I don't think the schematics for them were ever openly available. I do have a few test boards I made to try making my own cartridges, but I haven't tested them yet. On general Tomy data, you can find a lot on this Tomy Tutor site. I think there is even a good bit of data on the cassette signalling there. Almost every other Tomy site in existence is only in Japanese, which may not help you much. You can find a lot of the Japanese data by searching on ぴゅう太 as opposed to Pyuuta.

One note, a lot of those really old PLAs had their fuses blown to prevent you from reading them out to copy them. Most of the time, you have to find copies of the equations used to generate the original programming (sometimes this exists) or go through the somewhat laborious process of running it through a cycle that tests every single input combination, record the outputs, and use that to figure out what the original program code was doing (this should let you recreate the equations, which can be used to recreate the programming file).

MDM5 is part of the various EB Suite cartridges the Great Gazoo built--and his version works with all disk controllers, not just the HFDC. That said, yes, there are those still using it.

That's the mod I was thinking of, Michael.

I'm still mulling it over--as I wait for the results of my COVID-19 test to come back. . .

Looks like an interesting alternate to the DREM, if they get it working with TI disk formats. The DREM is already fully compatible with the TI, but choices are always a good thing. . .

One note, if your Geneve was originally purchased through Albert Visser of LCC, he made some mods to the boards to make them work better in Europe. . .and I don't remember what they were, offhand, but I think he posted the changes in either TIdjingen or TI Revue.

That was its purpose--and as you noted, using it could cause issues, @Toucan

And note: loading versions of the software between 6.82 and 6.85 (the last versions compatible with your programmer) will brick your programmer if it is a counterfeit. It is possible to recover from a bricking, but you have to cut a trace on the circuit card (the procedure for that is on the Autoelectric (XGECU) website) and reload the software that was originally SHIPPED with your programmer. This problem generally only occurs if you bought your hardware new within the last two to three years, as pretty much everything available after the beginning of 2018 was fake/counterfeit. Older devices are almost always original, and won't have this problem.

The Amnion public domain collection had about a dozen disks of Logo programs in it. Some of them were games. IIRC. I don't think I have ever seen a program written in FORTRAN for the 99/4A in the wild. I know there are a few out there, I just haven't ever personally seen one outside of the example programs included with the package.

TI also sent registered users a kit that would allow them to perform the mod on their own. I think I may still have one of them lurking about. . .

Thank you! These are perfect for the restoration process I've been doing with other TI schematics!