DS990 Commercial Computer System - anyone has experience?

[fabrice montupet]

I am not a MAME developer so I can't tell you that you'll find all the information needed for a MAME emulation, but I can surely say that in this manual (an original, not a copy) there are all the schematics and diagrams to repair, reproduce a model 770 and even develop a ... Tiny770 :-)

[+mizapf]

I am not a MAME developer

 

Well, think about it.

[piero.a]

I forgot to say that I also have the large TI printer that was used with this model of computer.

For history, my DS990 was used in one of the famous old french factories, that produced the "Dentelle de Calais", a prestigious lace. I also collected 8" disks and mini-tapes, they contain the programs a datas of the factory :-)

I own the same configuration ds990/1 fd1000 omni810 but I miss original operating system. I was able to run some floppy of 771 but it seems not completely compatible in floppy writing. It fail for example, the IBM exchange utility. Excuse me for my bad English, I'm Italian :-)

[fabrice montupet]

Not sure that my English is better than yours, I'm French :-)

[+Schmitzi]

Wot ? (I´m German)

[fabrice montupet]

I have found a professional scanner, now I have to find time to desolidarize all the pages of the book and to scan all them.

I think that it will be useful for Klaus and all other people who would like to repair the DS990. I will keep you posted :-)

[piero.a]

Somebody found the operating system? I tried to contact several times times in the last year John Hnatowych (FB jhnatowych) who was the only one known that have all the original floppy but him don't answer any more...

[+FarmerPotato]

Hi, kl99 said "welcome to the club" on my thread.  This must be the club

 

I photographed my incomplete set of boards from a DS990/1.
 

I got a TMS9981. I wrote a summary of the date codes (79-80 , w/ outlier in 82)  it has an unidentified DIP40 chip, with weirdly located VCC and GND pins. 
 

 

 

 

They came from an estate auction of a former stenography business.  The boards were separated from the DS990/1 housing and listed as "PC boards".  I could not possibly get the CRT and floppies as they were "pickup only".  

[+FarmerPotato]

@kl99 maybe you learned this already:

TX990 is the Executive program in TXDS. TX990 could also run alone, with an end-user application on top.  

I’ve been reading the manuals for TXDS and everything related. (But not DX10 or DNOS,  different animals for bigger machines.)

 

TX990 is the operating system  Executive, which launches Programs, schedules everything for multitasking, and provides system calls through XOP 15 vector.  There are other Executives, which show that TI tried to keep common interfaces. (See manuals from 1978-1981.)

 

The TXDS package included TX990 and utilities such as the Editor, TXMIRA assembler (not the bigger SDSMAC), and linker. All of these are described in Geoff Vincent’s TI Software Development Handbook (for new employees) and elsewhere.

 

There are 5 TXDS 2.0 floppies in Bitsavers software folder, under the ti/990 AMPL directory. I see TX990 and utilities, but no BASIC or other high-level language.

 

(AMPL was the 9900 emulator software and peripheral cable. It plugged into the processor socket of any 9900 you were developing.) 

TXDS 2.0 Floppies

 

The first floppy is called TX Parts. This looks like it is the TX990 executive. 

 

It has TXLIB.OBJ, in the familiar, uncompressed Tagged Object Format.
 

TXLIB concatenates many OBJ files, which you can easily separate.  TXLIB starts with the 5K program segment called TXROOT.  
 

The  second floppy has the assembler tools. 3 and 4  are variants of TX990 for different terminals. Disk 5 has more utilities such as IBM floppy conversion. 
 

You can extract the files with Dave Pitts’ FPYUTIL tool. (I wrote a sh script to automate it.) 

 

TX Parts 

 

TXLIB concatenates many object files with REF/DEF relations. Like a library of object files. 

 

Each object has a length tag 1, and a PSEG tag with 8 character program segment tag. So you can see the relative size.  
 

In TXROOT segment,  I see lots of DEF tags matching the TX990 Operating System Manual. There are also lots of REFs to other object segments, so the whole installation would take more than 5K. 

You use the included utility SYSGEN to configure the system—presumably linking some optional modules—also designating how much RAM to use for buffers etc. 

 

The TX990 2.3 Operating System manual describes SYSGEN and the resulting object sizes.

 

 

The RX manual gives the memory sizes that results from choosing options for terminal support, and Device Independent File I/O, and IPC. DIFIO has its own manual, it’s on Bitsavers. 
 

SYS files

.SYS files are the tools or utility programs. They are all in compressed tagged object format. 

 

 

The .OBJ files were, I guess, all  for re-linking during SYSGEN. They’re in uncompressed tagged object format. why the difference? Wild guess: SYSGEN has a loader/linker only for uncompressed format. 
 

(Consult a TX990 manual to understand the tags that were not supported in E/A on the 4A.) 

 

SYMBOLS

 

Symbol names were always 6 characters in tagged object files. It’s defined in the file format used by ASSM1, TXMIRA, big SDSMAC.. but I guess not Line-by-line Assembler…

Object files are where the common 9900 heritage pervades our home computer corner.

 

 

MODULES

 

The TX990 Operating System Manual describes the function of each of these modules.  Some modules get re-generated by SYSGEN in the form of source you must assemble--for instance, the list of all your device DSRs.

 

% grep : TXLIB.OBJ
:      TXROOT    02/10/77  11:23:04    SDSMAC 947075 *D                 TXRO0079
:      TITTCM    01/25/77  12:57:07    SDSMAC 947075 *D                 TITT0011
:      CRTPRO    02/11/77  18:55:46    SDSMAC 947075 *D                 CRTP0011
:      STA913    02/07/77  11:49:49    SDSMAC 947075 *D                 STA90009
:      SVC913    02/07/77  11:57:28    SDSMAC 947075 *D                 SVC90018
:      STA911    03/15/77  11:59:10    SDSMAC 947075 *D                 STA90014
:      SVC911    03/15/77  11:54:52    SDSMAC 947075 *D                 SVC90027
:      IOSUPR    01/28/77  20:12:32    SDSMAC 947075 *D                 IOSU0050
:      TSKFUN    01/25/77  12:08:53    SDSMAC 947075 *D                 TSKF0019
:      TSKLDR    01/17/77  20:12:53    SDSMAC 947075 *D                 TSKL0019
:      CNVRSN    01/14/77  09:06:09    SDSMAC 947075 *D                 CNVR0018
:      MEMSVC    02/05/77  11:42:26    SDSMAC 947075 *D                 MEMS0005
:      TBUFMG    02/05/77  11:43:45    SDSMAC 947075 *D                 TBUF0010
:      DTASK     01/18/77  17:51:48    SDSMAC 947075 *D                 DTAS0010
:      TXSTRT    01/14/77  10:40:20    SDSMAC 947075 *D                 TXST0014
:      TXEND     02/08/77  17:03:04    SDSMAC 947075 *D                 TXEN0020
:      STASK     01/14/77  10:37:40    SDSMAC 947075 *D                 STAS0010

 

Half of the TXROOT module lines are REF/DEF table!

 

Here are the module (program segment) sizes from the '0' tags.  TXROOT is 1350 bytes.

 

Sizes (in hex)
% grep ^0 TXLIB.OBJ|cut -c2-13
0546 TXROOT
00B2 TITTCM
00A4 CRTPRO
008A STA913
0196 SVC913
0100 STA911
0278 SVC911
03BA IOSUPR
0126 TSKFUN
0170 TSKLDR
0180 CNVRSN
0024 MEMSVC
008E TBUFMG
00B2 DTASK
00D2 TXSTRT
0090 TXEND
00BA STASK

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[+FarmerPotato]

The preceding post, on TX990, was a rough draft with a lot of errors.  I'm pulling most of it out for further editing.

 

 

[+FarmerPotato]

I have found a collection of 8" floppies. They are backups of text-to-speech utilities as they were developed at TI over 1981-1983. The backups were made from a 990/10 running DX10.

 

Would someone be able to help me recover these? @kl99 @fabrice montupet

I am completely lacking in 8" drives. 

[fabrice montupet]

Hi,

Alas, at this time my 990/10 is out of service after the power supply died, damaging at the same time some cards (as CPU, RAM and CRT ones) 🙁 🙁 I tried to repair it some months ago but without success. I planned to try again when I'll have to free time

[+retroclouds]

If any of you have this machine in working order, I’d love to see a short video of it in action. 

You know the saying “seeing is believing”.

 

Seriously though, I’d love to try my hands on one of these. Imagine interfacing the machine with the TI-99/4a