Search results

I still have not done the experiment. Chips are still sitting on the kitchen table. Three years?! I really need to clean that thing.

Probably not useful, but the Xilinx XC1736D is on the list of supported devices for the Needham EMP-30 programmer. That's a very old programmer. Needham went out of business in the early 2000s. It was a $1500 programmer in its day, IIRC.

@robin-fo 's advice is good. I thought I would offer one theory on why the drive is behaving this way. Many third party formatting softwares allow one to create multiple partitions on the one disk and then select whether the partitions are visible on boot or not. A utility which came with...

I have a Focus Turbonet Phonenet connector here, and on the back it says it was manufactured under license from Farallon. This is one of Focus's early ones. Later they switched to a box without the sloped front and added a termination switch, so the little plugs with resistor could be...

Thank you, gentlemen, @Phipli , @zigzagjoe . I appreciate the reassurance. I wasn't too worried for the reasons you mention and I'll find something I can test them in before applying any solder. I mostly posted to add another report to what's going on. At the price they sell these for...

I think I may have bought fakes for my SE/30 reloaded boards. The date code on all of them is QEED0823, which puts the year before the week, and 08 is later than any of the dates in the table. Unless they were made in 1923. Also the emblem is Motorola's not Freescale's. Mask label is...

I'll get in my time machine and get right on that.

78759... Heh. I live less than 5 minutes from where their office was way back when.

Okay, I had all the disks in my floppy archive. Years ago I copied all my floppies to disk images. I put them here: http://sphinxgroup.org/PAS16/ Let me know if the images work. They should just be Disk Copy images. If there's a problem I can binhex them or something. I also had an...

I will see if I can find it and hope the floppy drive is still working. I haven't tried it in a while. I know it's around here somewhere.... I may have a copy already archived to a hard drive in which case the process will be easier.

Not anything of note to contribute, but will note that my PAS16 did come with a copy of "Out of This World". It always felt like it was a powerful piece of hardware with no real drivers or software to support it, back in the day. It will be cool if you unlock its mysteries. 30 years...

Amazing work!

It's a great article. But... My main quibble and it's pretty much a nitpick is that it sort of implies that an XGecu programmer is required for the process. On the other hand, the instructions are for someone using an XGecu. But the same procedure can be done with other programmers...

Forgot to mention, the S900 and J700 motherboards have identical form factors (they're the same board, but populated differently). The desktop case of the J700 and the tower case of the S900 are actually the same model of case from Palo Alto Products, the ATCX Convertible. The drive cage is...

Power Computing made its Catalyst clones* with a CPU slot which is identical to the Apple PowerSurge (X500/X600) CPU slot, except... There's one signal missing on the cards. I can't remember which one. I'd have to dig through email from the early 2000s to find it. Anyway, CPU cards from...

Very cool. Did they ever use this newer Valkyrie design in any machines? Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to do a contrast/compare with the original Valkyrie, so impossible to know how different it is. I think I have a couple thousand of those SGRAM chips in the attic...

That's the article I wrote way back when. By today's standards, way too much detail on the soldering and probably some of the (soldering) details are bad advice. But it is more than 25 years old, so... But there was also discussion in the forum regarding specific cards and firmware versions...

Because these are DRAMs, they interleave the addresses. So adding one address line would add two address bits to the address space. So, if a tenth address bit is available, one could address 1M X 16 (these are 256K X 16) chips. Finding 16 bit wide memory chips is not easy. Alternatively...

They're great. They have weird sockets like the ROM/cache sockets for many old world PCI Macs (x500, 6400, 6500, X100 PDS, G3 Perch). Oh, also a large stash of the 64 pin SIMM sockets. Quest is also great. They actually have stock of the X500/X600 CPU sockets in both through hole and SM...

Whether the Bandit is "seen" at F2000000 or F4000000 seems to be determined by how pins 186 and 187 on the Bandit are biased. In other words, the Bandit's address changes as the bias on those pins is changed. I think. Could be wildly wrong.... Because the PowerSurge architecture was...