Ksarul

Note that the plastic Myarc clamshells are from the same molds as the later plastic clam shells from TI. Myarc just ordered them from the OEM, just like most of the third-party cartridge manufacturers got their shells--they just used the TI molds with blank ID plates.

If it isn't in the repositories with the main program, the library (or its equivalent) probably doesn't exist yet. Building the library for c99 has a number of useful advantages, as it may make porting of other cc65 programs easier.

The CF7/nano is definitely one of the more widespread late-era addons for the TI. I counted up the feedback he had for sales about five years ago--and he'd sold well over 300 of them by then. Those numbers are quite a bit higher now, as he was selling at least 50 of them a year.

Actually, I read an article BITD that mentioned that at least one Chinese university was using a bunch of Geneve 9640s in one of their courses of study. I suspect there was a lot of interest there in learning about the overall capabilities of the 9900 processor family due to its use in some military systems. . .I'm pretty sure the interest had no connection to possible commercial use.

I haven't seen any surplus sources of the clamshells, but it would probably be relatively easy to make some out of a metal ceiling tile. You would just have to form it into two halves of a nesting box, put screw holes at the appropriate locations and use nylon standoffs inside to get the boards porperly positioned, and cut a proper sized opening in the base for the card edge. Foundation and Atronic both did something similar with a lot of their boards.

This style was in the power supplies for the /4 and the early /4A machines. The connector wasn't directly attached to the P/S board either--it was on a short cable. About 90% of all power supplies out there use the later 4-pin type that connects directly to the board.

Here is a nice group of cartridge boards. . .for a very reasonable price. Looks like they just sold too--and for an even better price, as he lowered it sometime after I posted the link here.

Here are the right connectors on Amazon. . .the ones I found on eBay are cheaper, though. Note, these are the ones that go to the older style power supply boards. . .

I bought some of these MOLEX connectors a few years ago on eBay. Both halves show up there on occasion, but I had to hunt though a whole lot of listings until I found them. I used them up a long time ago. . .so I should probably go looking again.

It is no longer supported, and if you are trying to update to the 6.85 software revision, be aware that if your TL-866CS is a fake, the software WILL brick your programmer. The Autoelectric site shows a mod that will allow you to unbrick the programmer, but even then, you have to load the software revision provided with your programmer to get it to work (although versions up to about 6.80 should work if yours is older than that). The bricking function was introduced in 6.81/6.82. Some of the fakes use 6.82 through 6.85, with most that I've seen locked into 6.82.

If you don't want cramped hands, I strongly suggest staying away from the original TI Pain Sticks (the ones TI sold--either version). The older version will bite into the flesh of your hand (the ball on top is shaped like one of those slotted honey-dipper balls) and the later ones are just a weird size/shape that is only suitable for children under the age of seven or so. In larger hands, they just hurt. . .even though they do work well otherwise.

Definitely go slow for a while. This one doesn't let go of the body quickly. . .or cleanly. Some side effects don't become obvious for a month or more (like weakening of the heart muscle).

AMI made S9900 (TMS9900), S9901 (TMS9901) and several other chips in the TMS9900 family. The federal Government required that TI have a second source for any chips incorporated in government systems, and AMI was TI's authorized second source. A lot of CorComp cards have the S9901s in them. This is the first time I've seen one in the console, though. It does look like it was part of the original wave solder assembly too, so that is really interesting. Based on the time the chip was made, it looks like it was from the production frenzy right before TI pulled out of the market, so they might have had to buy some from AMI due to internal shortages.

Actually, @Tursi, that weird power supply connector was really common in 1981 machines. I have several of them. . .

Vitamin D is definitely a good thing here. . .the body seems to consume a lot of it when you have COVID, and if you are low to start with, it definitely impacts the body's ability to fight it off.

The main issue with the disks is that they put the catalog track somewhere completely different. Plato expects to be able to read that odd catalog track to pull up the software. It also expects all of the standard low-level access routines of the disk controller DSR to be present when reading disks.

Yep, I've been using this to test the last few batches of SAMS cards I've built. It works like a charm--and will even detect and test one of my 4M cards. . .

The LOGO Manual is up on the Hexbus site as a scan that Ernie did a number of years back. He scanned the commercial version of the book, but the contents are identical to the TI manuall, IIRC. Only the covers and a few lead-in pages are different.

Not to forget that Ron Walters found an error in the Gate Array when designing his memory expansion for the Geneve. That was one reason anything larger than a 512K expansion needed the modification in the Gate Array area. This problem may have been part of the reason that Myarc never released their own large memory card for it. Genmod also allows for a huge chunk of zero-wait-state memory (switch selected so that it wouldn't interfere with programs expecting slower memory).

Actually, the Pre-School label stayed with it for the British release. I have one with the Pre-School Early Learning Fun title screen (it has a paper label though, so it may have actually been a qual unit). I'll have to dig it out and look at the GROMs to see if they are the version without the "A" at the end. The letter on the TMC 1985 also explains why C. B. Wilson had one of them too--he was the hardware manager at that point in time, per the signature block.

Rich, there is one caveat to your statement here: 5 GROMs in the XB cartridge only provide 30K of addressable space (6K per GROM), not 40K (8K per GROM). Yes, later solutions were able to use the full 8K per GROM space (GRAMulator and GRAM Kracker), but that capability only became available long after this advertisement was made. Based on what was available from TI at the time, the largest cartridge could only have 42K (30K GROM and 12K ROM), although the ad ignores the bank-switched portion of the cartridge memory space. The box counts all of the available memory spaces with one exception: Speech Memory, which is also in a memory space of its own, like VDP and GROM memory are. Some TI ads reflected this additional space, others didn't.

The most RAM you could have that would be CPU accessible without masking out the console ROMs would be 32K (expansion RAM) + 8K (Cartridge space) + 8K (DSR space) = 48K. Note that TI also made a card that did this, and that card also bank switched memory in most areas to get up to 128K. The card was never commercially produced, however. SAMS ended up being a much better solution for larger memory spaces, as there are a lot of the 1M boards in circulation now along with an ever-expanding software library that uses it.

You are both correct on this. Marc originally called it the SID Blaster (and I actually included that name on the original layout I did for him). He changed the name to SID Master 99 before he had the first lot of boards fabricated, though. It has been SID Master 99 ever since (and I should have a new run of the boards in hand within a few weeks, along with some more PEB Extenders, as I am just waiting for the fab to finish them and send them my way).

I run an HFDC that Tony installed H16 into as the floppy controller in my test system. It works quite well.

The primary function of bidder masking was to eliminate shill bidder complaints. . .