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Ksarul

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Posts posted by Ksarul

  1. Posted

    They did. It worked much like an enhanced 32K card, in that it gave the normal 32K space. Where it changed that was that there was also a bank that sat in the DSR space at >4000 and another bank that sat in the cartridge space at >6000. This gave you the possibility of programs that filled up to 48K of expansion memory, assuming you didn't need to bank the DSR space in and out. The card also banks in the remaining memory into various parts of the 32K spaces, so you could conceivably build large programs that used the whole card and banked the routines needed for individual parts of program execution at the time they were needed. All the bank switching is controlled by the PALs on the card via SBZ or SBO commands. I have all of the documentation for it, along with the original schematics. Urbite used what I had to reconstruct the PAL code, and I also have a partly assembled board I bought from Mike Dudeck ages ago. It didn't have the PALs, so I disassembled the bits that were assembled to use the bare board as a template during my reconstruction of the layout.

     

    I thought it was an interesting prototype, which is why I decided to work on it. Mine is not the only one out there--one or two assembled boards exist in the wild, one of which was assembled as a 64K board (I suspect it was probably used as the prototype for another TI memory board that never made it into production--the 64K ExtraRAM board). I have the documentation for that board as well. . .but I haven't done a layout for it yet (it is a back-burner project that I've done a little work on though).

    • Like 1

  2. Posted

    There's been some random discussion on trying to set up the CF7+ as an HD, but I don't think anyone has gotten so far as to try writing a DSR that will do it. The real limiter there is that the CF7 DSR is a modified disk controller DSR. You'd have to either massively modify it (and the disk manager) to work with larger volumes and subdirectories, or you'd have to jettison it and start with a hard disk DSR and modify that to work with the CF7 in place of the current disk DSR. Then you'd have to get a modified disk manager that recognizes the new setup. . .definitely not trivial, as the DSR side of interfacing with the CF7 isn't well-described or published by Jaime Malilong, the CF7 developer. Fred Kaal probably knows the most about interfacing programs with it, as he wrote the best disk managers for it to date. That won't help on the DSR to CF7 hardware side though.

  4. Posted

    I may have one or two laying around as well. I seem to remember having purchased a case of spares about 10 years ago. I'd have to find it though, assuming you still need one. They come up on eBay pretty regularly too (often in a Radio Shack bag, as they bought a lot of surplus from TI and sold them as parts for people who liked to tinker).

  5. Posted

    The only way to have a memory card in the PEB that actually provides more than 32K is to have a card designed to work using more space installed. The most common of those cards would be the Super AMS board, which gives up to 1024K--and which is bank switched. There are a few programs and utilities that make use of this feature out there--and new things for it are still being developed, although at a slow pace. The RAMBO modification for the Horizon RAMDisk provided a similar bank switched user space. The only other option I know of was the prototype 128K card produced by TI. It actually gave you 48K all the time by working as a 32K card which put some additional RAM in the DSR space at >4000 and in the cartridge space at >6000. The rest was bank switched at need by user programs designed to use it.

     

    Multiple 32K cards in the PEB give no advantage whatsoever, as the TI OS expects the memory card to fit into a specific, 32K portion of the memory map, and all memory cards automatically fall into that same space unless they were designed to do something differently, as identified for the three examples above.

  10. Posted

    You might want to make sure that the felt in the cartridge port (assuming you have not removed it yet) is not filled with lots of grease and metal bits. That will cause problems like yours. You might also have a cracked lower cartridge port connector or some fatigued solder joints.

  11. Posted

    Michael's board looks distinctly like a one-off, hand etched board. If there really was interest in a PEB speech adapter, I could take one of the designs and do a new layout for it--after I finish with the through-hole IDE board. . .which is progressing nicely lately. I'm getting close to the 70% line on that one, although the last 30% of any board is usually the longest part, as it often involves rearrangement of components to get more optimum trace flow.

    • Like 4

  13. Posted

    It actually took me a long time to end up with one of those little yellow books--about 30 years. Even stranger is that I have probably the most complete multilingual collection of TI books and magazines out there. . .somehow I didn't end up with too much from Great Britain, though that hole is slowly being filled in (I have the books now, but I'm missing most of the magazines).

  17. Posted

    I've got the complete set of the ones Infocom released for the TI--and a complete set of the later Asgard releases of the ones Barry Boone translated over to the TI format, all in original Infocom boxes/folders. I may have to take pictures of them one of these days when I have some extra cycles. . .

  18. Posted

    There are actually a number of different floppy controllers for the TI that do Double Density. The Myarc FDCC-1 and the CorComp DSDD, are the two most common ones, and usually run from $120-$200 each, depending on how long it has been since one showed up as available. There are outliers that have gone above $300, but that is really not common. The Myarc HFDC is about the next most common--and it also allows you to connect MFM hard disks to the TI. These usually go for around $250 or so. The next most common after that would be the SNUG BWG DSDD Controller, which usually goes for $150 to $200. Beyond that things get more difficult. In Europe, you might also find an Atronic DSDD controller (about $200), but they are not at all common. The TI prototype DSDD controllers are extremely rare--I doubt more than 30 or so of them are around (I have three of them, one of which I built from an original TI kit)--and they were prone to heat issues so users went to interesting extremes to heat sink them for stable operation. These go for as little as $200 and as much as $500 depending on interest level at the time of sale.

     

    There are several sidecar options as well. The CorComp 9900 will give the equivalent of an RS232, 32K, and DSDD controller attached to the side of the console--these often sell in the $250-$350 range. The Myarc MPES-50 rarely comes up for sale, but it does the same (and has two disk drives integrated into the box). I got mine for about $200, but that was mostly because no one else knew what it was at the time it was being sold. In Europe, there was also the Atronic CPS99, which worked in the same fashion as the other two, also with the integrated drives. They usually hit the $300-$350 range when they come up for sale.

     

    That's pretty much it for DSDD controllers, with the exception of the prototype Hex-Bus controllers. They usually go for $200 to $600 each--and there are maybe 20 of them in the wild, so they usually end up in the hands of collectors, not users. There is also an IDE hard disk controller designed by Thierry Nouspikel (about 100 of these were made as part of a group parts buy), the Myarc Personality Card (a SASI controller), and two different SCSI controllers (one from WHT and the other from SNUG). The SNUG ASCSI was the better of the two, although later revisions of the WHT card (or modified earlier revisions) work just as well. Any of these cards will run between $200 and $300 most of the time.

     

    Lastly, you have the option of modifying the TI DSSD card for 80 tracks--as already noted. This gives the additional disk space, but the mod isn't too common (easy, just not very common).

     

    Note: DD disks come in two flavors: 160K/320K (16 soft sectors per track) or 180K/360K (18 soft sectors per track). Only four controllers directly supported the 16-sector mode--Myarc DDCC-1, Myarc HFDC, TI DSDD, and TI Hex-Bus. All others would only work in 18-sector mode (and the Myarc cards could read/write it as well, but the TI controllers could not). The Myarc controllers could also do 720K using 80-track disks, making them ideal for use with 3.5 inch disks.

     

    Two other single density options existed--a sidecar from TI and a sidecar from Percom Data (the TX-99). The TI variant usually goes for $30 to $50 and the Percom goes from $50 to $100 (and has an integrated drive).

  19. Posted

    I was doing some random searching today and I found this very interesting TI blog from a TI user who has apparently been working in a bit of a vacuum. He has apparently gotten an FTP client and a TCPIP stack running on a TI with AMS memory. . .he also has it running on a 99/8!

     

    Looking at his blog posts, he has a LOT of interesting things going on, but his last post is about 4 years ago, which worries me. I don't have accounts on any of the services that can post comments to the blog, unfortunately. . .

     

    Here's the URL:

     

    http://forgottenti.blogspot.com/

    • Like 3

  21. Posted

    That is one very useful program--so long as you have a controller in your PC that supports the single-density that many TIs use--it also works great for double-density disks, though I haven't tried to format a TI DSDD disk in 160K or 320K (used by early Myarc Controllers and both of the prototype DSDD controllers from TI (Hex-Bus and PEB Card)--and I have an example of each type).

  23. Posted

    Not at all, Gary. Collecting by clamshell variant--unless it was to get one of each type for a reference set (and then it doesn't matter much what the card inside is) would be seriously excessive. . .

     

    I wasn't looking too closely at the card, Lee, other than to see that it wasn't one of the later, black CorComp clamshells. I just wanted to bring attention to the fact that the card inside might be seriously different than other CorComp FDCs that most people have run into. . .

  25. Posted

    A single GROM slot uses 8K. A normal TI cartridge uses up from one to five slots. That means you could have up to 16 cartridges with a single GROM each, or any combination of cartridges that takes up no more than 16 slots total. Note that GROMs are also hard coded for their address range, so you would have to set up something that shifts the GROM base for anything that duplicates an address used by a cartridge in a different slot.

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