Unexpected ewaste find: MicroQue PDS4/Top Hat. Quad LC PDS Adapter!

[al kossow]

Running a bunch of PDS cards with the stock power supply would be challenging.

 

[maceffects]

I kind of what to clone this and I don't know why...

 

[Compgeke]

Am I right in thinking you ended up with Chocky's RiscPC? If so, that's heading towards being some kind of historic artefact, though possibly under the category of "great dedication to bashing one's head against walls"—the RISC OS Firefox port looked like a horrible job.

Not just his Risc PC, I also ended up with his Iyonix. The RPC itself is actually really nice though, it came with a Kinetic upgrade and an eesox graphic equalizer in the top slice. Not sure where the equalizer came from no one else has seen them before.

 

[olePigeon]

I kind of what to clone this and I don't know why...

Just the adapter? Or the whole thing?

 

[maceffects]

You know me, I want to do it all

 

[olePigeon]

@maceffects I can't remember, are you in the Bay Area? If so, you're welcome to borrow mine.

 

[maceffects]

@olePigeon I wish I was, I’m here in the Midwest. Appreciate the offer though! To be fair, I probably don’t need more projects. It’s like some kind of addition.

 

[max1zzz]

@maceffects Well if you do ever decide you need another project I would 100% buy one. I need more reproduction parts to go with my reproduction boards

 

[Melkhior]

Um... we're sure it's an LC card? As in the 020 that got half it's bus width stolen???

It's only the RAM (both onboard & SIMMs) that is half-width at 16 bits in the LC. The ROM is 32-bits wide, and the PDS has access to all 32-bits of data as well. It doesn't have access to all address bits though, and that's an issue.

The missing address bits (and signals for the synchronous cycles of the '030) are on the extension part of the slot in the LCIII and later.

Has anyone eventually tried to reverse engineer this? It seems a fairly straightforward design, with just U1 being masked by a sticker so could be difficult. The Toshiba chips are bus switches so easy to understand. I do wonder how this is supposed to work given the limited addressing available on the LC.

 

[VMSZealot]

A clone of this card would be great - and especially if it could relocate the cards in the standard case. After all, there's lots of dead space to accommodate a card where the hard drive was intended to go - and SCSI to SD adaptors don't take up a lot of space. So that would make a configuration with Apple II card at the back (for those of us who still have a Y cable!) and ethernet at the front, with the ethernet cable squeezing out of - well - squeezing out of somewhere. The case is hardly watertight!