Ksarul

Or just note the current limitations and keep this one in hand as a future enhancement. . .

You definitely need the LS version of the chip, although you could replace it with an HCT variant (although I'm not sure if they ever did an HCT variant of the 379s). I tend to keep several hundred of them on hand for the boards I build, so they are always available within the community if Stuart doesn't have any (I bought 250 of them this past weekend because I was running low). Which EPROM board are you looking at? The only one that had the socket too close to the case from the ones Jon did were the 16K boards. . .and all of mine are set to ensure sufficient clearance.

I'm actually trying to get set up to do PALs/GALs. The catch with those is being able to read them (fuses set to prevent reading) or getting the necessary JEDEC files. I have a couple of them now, but not many.

On the P-GRAM, no Sabre Wulf would not work there, as the P-GRAM only as two banks of 8K in the >6000 space.

There is one important benefit of the cartridge--some of the purchase price goes to Rasmus, letting him know that folks truly appreciate his works (and hopefully, acts a a minor additional incentive to make more of his wonderful TI programs). There is no difference between the disk and the cartridge versions of the other games though--though a cartridge also makes the games a bit more portable than the HxC would be (and they look nice too).

Thanks to Bob Carmany, I have the layouts and PAL code for the Quest RAM Disk from Australia. I've got about 75% in my CAD software at the moment--now I just have to finish that and do a complete trace check using the schematics so that I can actually properly identify each component on the board.

It would be good to discuss permission on the HRDs and other cards he sold as well. . .we definitely don't want to lose long term access to any of them.

I often had to deal with space-rated stuff for a few years--and the product specifications were one of those things that were seriously stringent. They'd had so many issues with poorly soldered equipment items in the 50s that they went so far in the other direction on their standards that it became nearly impossible to meet them. . .lowball bidders had no chance there--especially if they didn't understand the extreme QC that every part went through on receipt.

We'd still need permission to reissue it from Bud Mills. . .

There were two programs for controlling older style X-10 interfaces with the TI. One used a cartridge and a cable connected to the joystick port (from CorComp). The other used a disk and the RS-232 (I don't have that one, but I do have the manual for it). Ohm was trying to interface a Firecracker sometime last year, but I'm not sure if he got anywhere with it.

Dragon Flyer, also known as Spotshot when it was initially released. DataBioTics had a tendency to change the names of programs over time to make them look like something new. . .and Spotshot was the first DBT cartridge I bought back in the day--along with Black Hole.

I think I have an EPROM of it running on one of my Red boards, Tator. Let me do a check today. . .I burned it right before the Faire, so I'm not sure that I had time to test it yet (the last three days before the Faire were a blur of preparatory activity).

Look carefully, that keyboard uses keys that are more white than cream--it looks like a high-performance version of the keyboard. If it followed NASA space-rating rules, it used gold contacts and circuit card traces throughout. . .

Senior_Falcon, that museum keyboard looks suspiciously like the one normally connected to a /4A. . .

An 80-track drive writes thinner tracks than the 40-track drives do. That said, you can almost always READ a 40-track on an 80-track drive--but writing to it leads to disaster. It is best not to mix working disk formats for that reason. The 720K 5.25 disk drives and the 720K 3.5 disk drives are interchangeable as far as any TI disk controller is concerned (so long as it is 80-track capable).

Look at the command CALL LOAD. You have to do a CALL INIT somewhere in the program before you use it, but it does load values into memory like POKE on other machines. . .

It would be better to put the 32K inside the console for this kind of thing, with an external switch to turn it off if you eventually want to expand the system using conventional means. . .

They should--a P-GRAM doesn't have any issues with a standard AMS card, so it should work with a HyperAMS too.

In a word: compatibility.

I'd seen a few of the Sony Hit-Bit MSX computers in the US as well. They showed up in DC thrift stores pretty often in the early nineties. . .

They're probably trimming some of the speech data, Acadiel. . .and I'm not sure where the loaders came from. I suspect one of them was on the disks TI put out as gifts to the community when they pulled out of the market, as Lasso was on those disks. . .

Anything except the XB portion of the cartridge requires 32K as it loads the programs into the 32K space--it will do crazy things otherwise. . .

The Atmega actually has the GROM files (120K of GROM) and the logic to emulate the TI GROM addressing. The bank switching for the 29F040 is accomplished using the 74LS378 chip. It extends the ROM banking to 64 8K banks, using non-inverted addressing (the Guidry 64K carts use inverted addressing to allow you to compare/contrast the file types). Any of the game images Gazoo put up here will run on the ROM side of the ÜberGROM (and don't need the Atmel at all). Only the various XB cart images need the Atmel, as they use both ROM and GROM.

That's a definite yes, Tempest--it just won't fit into expansion memory (unless you did some crazy shoehorning using a Super Cart, since that gives an additional 8K of memory--but it also only leaves 2K for your loader/GROM emulation code, and that may not be enough space either).

Here's a schematic of the ÜberGROM board, Michael. The 512K cartridge board works exactly like the ROM side of this board, as it uses the same bank-switching circuits (it just uses a DIP chip instead of a PLCC chip, and it can be downshifted to sizes as small as 8K). UberGROM-4 (Final).pdf