Adam EPROMs

[Milli V]

This Adam I am restoring has 4 eproms instead of the 3 roms on the motherboard They say REV 80, 3 are ALF 1, ALF 2, ALF 3 and EOS. I haven't seen one with eproms before

 

[adamcon]

This Adam I am restoring has 4 eproms instead of the 3 roms on the motherboard They say REV 80, 3 are ALF 1, ALF 2, ALF 3 and EOS. I haven't seen one with eproms before

 

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There are multiple variations of the ADAM board out there in the wild; this is but one of them. There were actually upgraded eproms or roms with the EOS and I beleive Smartwriter upgrades also. There were rev 81 and one other if my memory serves; they should be out there somewhere to download.

[NIAD]

This is a perfect example of what life must have been like at the Coloco manufacturing plant for the Adam. Waist not, want not.

 

Coleco commonly used and re-used Eproms to populate psroduction run CV and Adam carts and Adam Logic Boards. The earlier Adam boards (R57, R59, R79 and a good number of R80) were populated with three Eproms or Roms which contained the SmartWriter program and one Eprom or Rom for the EOS. Later, as a cost saving measure and possibly for additional programs like a spell checker, they reduced to two the number of Eproms or Roms required to store the SmartWriter code.

 

Having this additional socket available was never put to use by Coleco that I am aware of, but Syd Carter of Trisyd Video Games did release a Clock Chip that could be inserted into this open socket and with software that he wrote, accessed thru EOS and CP/M software. If memory serves me right (and I coild be mistaken), files saved with SmartWriter, etc. were automatically time stamped without having to load in some patch to the EOS. This would mean there is code in the EOS that checks for a Clock Chip in the proper U## socket.... but again, I could be wrong on this as it's been a long time.

 

BTW, there were a number of people that replaced the SmartWriter roms with SmartBasic and CP/M to boot directly into those.

 

The Rev. 81 and Rev. 84 SmartWriter roms were acquired by Doug R. back in the early 90s from a former Coleco employee who must have been in the R&D department because he also had a number of other very rare Adam protos. Doug sent them to me and then I sent them to Jim Walters to dump and disassemble. The dumped roms are available on Joe B.s website with additional details in a text file.

[Milli V]

Where in memory are these mapped?

[NIAD]

Hopefully HardHat or Rich Drushel can chime in with the answer to this.

[Milli V]

This is the first motherboard I've seen that doesn't have an eprom or empty socket

[NIAD]

This is the first motherboard I've seen that doesn't have an eprom or empty socket

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Another rarity, but probably not a real big one seeing as lots of ADAMs never have been opened up.