PB100 Strange Memory Slot Board

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

@trag you beat me to the post, you don't see ROM on the card?

edit: what's the video buffer's capacity, enough to do 21" at 1bit?

 

[trag]

@Trash80toHP_Mini Nope. Nothing that could be storage/ROM on the card.

I did notice a little, tiny potentiometer. I wonder what that's doing there and what happens if one adjusts its setting. Brightness? Contrast?

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

PB100 is based on the Backlit Portable, does that machine have the likes of a Video/Sound control panel in ROM? Would you need a Control Panel tp switch resolutions or might the Extension do the trick?

Second thought: there are more lines than needed for 1bit on the external connector. I'd guess it has the equivalent of sense lines in that case?

edit: @trag since Brightness/Contrast controls would be present on the display, could the potentiometer control output resolution?

 

[aplmak]

I'd love to try it out but I would need to find the cable or make a cable to the female socket. It appears to have 6 female pins. You both obviously know way more about this than me The hard drive was iffy so I wanted to back up any software that works with the board. The drive was very basic.. It had an OS and the WriteNow word processor.. that's all. I did fix the 40MB hdd though by fixing where the arm hits that sticky parking magnet and get's stuck. I removed all the wax type stuff and filled it up with epoxy and with the parking magnet in place. Anyways sorry I'm veering off. I'll work on getting a pic with it installed... just wrapping up the recap on the MB.

 

[demik]

So the PB100 system doesn't check for the likes of Declaration ROM at startup, hence the need for that bootstrap extension being loaded at startup.

Stuff build for 68000s Macs do not have Declaration ROMs since they do not support the Slot Manager. They just have INITs or/and weird software.

The main chip is a FPGA, so I guess it should work like the VideoMacPac built for the Macintosh Portable.
They are probably uploading bitstreams to the FPGA on the fly.

Really nice pice of hardware anyway Following.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Stuff build for 68000s Macs do not have Declaration ROMs since they do not support the Slot Manager. They just have INITs or/and weird software.

That's what I said IOW, an INIT needs to load at startup for a card to run in a pre-Slot Manager Mac because they don't poll for expansion cards as became the case in the Macintosh II, released along with the SE..

 

[demik]

That's what I said IOW, an INIT needs to load at startup for a card to run in a pre-Slot Manager Mac because they don't poll for expansion cards as became the case in the Macintosh II, released along with the SE..

My bad. I though you were saying another thing (non native english speaker here)

 

[aplmak]

Trash I found the PB100 Developer Notes at bitsavers... Not sure if you have this already or not. Link below

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/mac/powerbook/100/Powerbook_100_Developers_Note_1991.pdf

 

[aplmak]

I had a 4MB memory expansion card and I soldered 4 more 512K IC's on it to make a 6MB ram expansion card... Works great!!!

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Very cool! What brand is your card, hard to imagine Apple would uprovide a card that would be capable of upgrade, but the price of PSRAM in that time frame they might have? Full spec for the memory card is in that DevNote. I pulled all the documentation I could find together in this post:

PowerBook 100 Accelerator Insanity

PB100-PSRAM-Pinout PB100-ROM-TC531001CF-Pinout

68kmla.org

My bad. I though you were saying another thing (non native english speaker here)

No problem, I'm not very good at writing, between the two explanations the point might be clear. My last statement wasn't entirely clear, SE could be conflated with Macintosh_II architecture the way it was phrased.

The Mac II introduced Slot Manager method of addressing multiple expansion cards, while the SE PDS merely broke out the 68000 IC's pins to a buffered connector, that "slot" had been in use since the 128K.

 

[aplmak]

The card is generic. No manufacturer name on it. It’s an orange color pcb. The odd thing is stamped on it says 6MB but it only had a total of 4MB.. I’ll take it apart later to grab a pic and post.. I have another 4MB one that’s blue pcb and I think that’s a brand name.. they left again spots for additional memory IC chips.. but I’d have to also add the smd capacitors as they are missing if I wanted to boost it up. The other board had the capacitors installed..