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Unexpected ewaste find: MicroQue PDS4/Top Hat. Quad LC PDS Adapter!
- Thread starter Compgeke
- Start date
I kind of what to clone this and I don't know why...
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.
Just the adapter? Or the whole thing?
You know me, I want to do it all 
@maceffects I can't remember, are you in the Bay Area? If so, you're welcome to borrow mine.
@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.
@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 
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.
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!
Was there any movement on a clone of this card?
Would you be interested in selling or training it?
That is what I would like as well. I am just learning about circuit board diagrams so I am not the person create the new board. I wonder if we could get someone that has experience to clone it.
Would you mind taking some very high resolution photos of the card and sharing them?
This is probably just selectively enabling /AS and /DS to individual slots based on the status of a physical/logical switch to enable/disable.
I would be curious what U1 is doing - perhaps allows for installation of an accelerator in a certain one of the slots - but I don't expect anything terribly exotic. Termination resistors to help with signal integrity, pulls, buffer caps. It's not going to allow running multiple cards at the same time, just a way to switch between them. But as long as cards are well behaved, if you don't show a disabled card the address and data strobes disabled cards could happily co-exist on the same bus. Just don't change the status of the switch without the system being in reset (or powered off).
I would be curious what U1 is doing - perhaps allows for installation of an accelerator in a certain one of the slots - but I don't expect anything terribly exotic. Termination resistors to help with signal integrity, pulls, buffer caps. It's not going to allow running multiple cards at the same time, just a way to switch between them. But as long as cards are well behaved, if you don't show a disabled card the address and data strobes disabled cards could happily co-exist on the same bus. Just don't change the status of the switch without the system being in reset (or powered off).
would that be a card that you would be interested in reproducing?
Unfortunately no.... I have been struggling and failing to muster motivation to work on the projects I've already got in the air, so I'm definitely not taking on anything new.
Makes sense. How did you get into cloning cards? What tools and lessons could I get into to possibly start. I have some ideas cards that I would like to try my hand at reproducing
