Ksarul

Progress!

You might also try moving the copper on the cartridge port edge connector back 10-15 thousandths of an inch. They don't like it when things go right to the edge of the board. . . Another suggestion is to bevel the corners of that card edge connector just a bit, as it will go into the cartridge port a lot more easily that way.

Yes, this mod changed the VDP to a 9928. There are several 9928 conversion projects that showed up in various newsletters, and the output from any of them would work with this RGB Interface if routed to the right pins on a DIN6 console connector.

One note on supercart boards--I have a number of bare boards here, already made, that allow from 8 to 32K RAM (4 switch-selectable 8K banks) and battery backup. I sell them for $7 each, shipped to a US address. . .may be faster than the manufacturing route, although these don't have the extra 36-pin connector to plug another cartridge into the board.

Nope, the cupboard is bare on this one. I'd read about these, but they were released while I was in Germany and were no longer available by the time I returned to the US. I've never seen one show up for sale either, so I still don't have one. I was eventually able to acquire an AVPC though, as they show up for sale once in a while (I had the same problem there, as they went on sale and then were no longer available by the time I initially went looking for one).

I think that's the first one of these I've actually seen in the wild. . .

Nice, a QC sheet. I've seen one or two of those before, but they are always a nice find. June 20 was a good day for a future hobbyist!

I'll have to look at @Gazoo's code to see what can be done there, as he used a bit of a brute force approach to build it (this was done before the regular UberGROM programming tools were released).

All of the Asgard releases were based on "The Master's" ports, so that is likely. The Master does show up here now and again, so he might be able to shed some light on the matter. Something to note on all of the Asgard releases. There are not a lot of any of these titles as true Asgard releases, as the agreement with Infocom said they had to use original packaging/disks from releases for other systems. Asgard received two large boxes of the titles from Infocom to make these packaging conversions. They literally cleared out the last of them that Infocom had in their warehouse to get those two boxes too, so the only way to get more was to find them on the secondary surplus market, assuming they wanted to make more. That wasn't the plan though, as they intended to sell what they had and be done with it (as noted in the newsletter that announced them in the first place). I helped Chris Bobbitt relabel a bunch of them in his basement during a visit to DC BITD and bought a complete set of them. The hardest one to get will be Leather Goddesses of Phobos, as there were four of them in the box. One went to Jim Horn, one went to Chris, one went to me, and the other one was sold to a lucky customer.

On the 99105 accelerator, I think that @Gary from OPA may be able to shed some light on the subject. ISTR that the major issues were related to bus timing, especially as related to the other peripherals in the system. The only other accelerator that I've seen mention of from BITD was a math accelerator card using the Motorola 68881. That one never made it past the prototype stage (I actually have that prototype and the rights to further develop it).

Here's a bit of a hack-n-slash PDF of the guetech manual. gue1.pdf

Possibly, but the thing with this one is that it was a more-or-less experimental card (worked great as far as the software was developed too). TI almost never made more than 100-200 copies of the circuit card in those circumstances, and a significant portion of them would be tested to destruction. There were probably at least 50 of them that were assembled and had a chance to make it into the wild though, and I've seen close to half that number in my wanderings over the years, so there isn't likely a major reservoir of them hiding anywhere unless I go insane and decide to recreate the board. . .

Also true--but like Extended BASIC, the E/A (and for that matter, the Minimemory) adds support for the rest of the TI memory space, which then moves these commands into the realm of useful.

One note, Munchman II is actually one of the cartridges released by Triton, along with The Great Word Race, Strike Three!, Super Extended BASIC, and 4A Flyer.

There are probably more of them than you suspect, Dan. I actually know of about 15-20 of them in collector hands, outside of the pair I have.

Extended BASIC has equivalent commands (CALL PEEK and CALL LOAD). Bog standard TI BASIC didn't need them, as there was no CPU memory to use them on (with the exception of the 256 bytes of scratchpad RAM), and it couldn't see any additional CPU memory if you did add some. For all of that, you needed Extended BASIC, which was why the appropriate commands were present there.

Actually, you would need to be able to test the TIM9904 and the TIM9904A, as opposed to the TMS9904, Dan. There are some significant differences between the two chip revisions, so much so that they can't be substituted for each other on boards designed for one or the other of them. It might also be nice to be able to test the NEC upd765, the WD1771, the WD1773, and the TMS9914.

Many thanks, Jim! Looks good.

Note one odd little bit about TI cartridges: there are pins in the cartridge port that are only used by the GROMs. A ROM-only device won't exercise those pins, and so will work perfectly. Another point is that the pins that are GROM-dependent are on the bottom of the cartridge port, the place where the connector gunk will be the worst in that cartridge port oiled felt. You really want to make sure those felts (hidden inside the cover protecting the cartridge connector and only accessible by removing the case from the TI to get at it) are gone. You could clean them, add some non-conducting oil and put them back, but the best solution is to remove them and put the cap back onto the connector. If this has no effect, you probably have a bad chip in your XB cartridge (generally not repairable unless you have a source of the original GROM chips and some TMS3532/TMS2564 chips to replace the mask ROMs).

ACS protection was a module/hardware combination to turn your TI into the central component of a whole-house alarm system. There are (somewhat) complete schematics of the central hardware unit out in the wild, but not much more other than some advertising flak.

I have an original, large format schematic for the Speech Synthesizer that I recently acquired. I'll try and get it scanned in over the Thanksgiving holiday. . .

Almost all true TI prototype cartridges were built on this board (it is called an EGROM cartridge board). TI actually sold these to developers in packs of two as bare boards BITD. I still have one of those two-packs somewhere in my reference board collection. . . These Advertizer boards and the Almelo TI GRAM card for the PEB helped inspire some of the earliest hobbyist GRAM devices in Europe too.

I have abandoned efforts to try and get the 2048K zero power chips working with the SAMS boards, as there are just too many problems with the ones available. The majority of available chips are seriously fiddly when it comes to establishing good pin connections, the internal batteries are generally no longer good (not a problem by itself, as the board doesn't need the battery to work) which often causes memory instabilities if the battery corrodes something in the chip, and the cost of new ones (one manufacturer still makes them) is stratospheric ($about $130-$150 per chip). That makes it uneconomical. On the 512K side, things are a little bit less of a problem. Pretty much any of the low power 512K Static Ram chips work fine. I've mostly used Alliance, Hitachi, or Samsung chips, with Alliance as my go to chip.

So far, so good, but the player selection data and other data elements are stored in the PCROMs, so the game needs both the EPROM data and the PCROM data to work. Note that PCROMs are a 6K memory chip with autoincrementing features, just like a standard TI GROM chip. They even expect to contain GPL code for execution. . .

Here's the entire scoop on how the Parker Brothers PCROMs worked, by one of the folks that devised them. . . wickstead_ti994a_PCROM_overview.pdf