Date : Mon, 26 Jun 2006 00:31:00 +0100
From : Philip Pemberton <philpem@...>
Subject: Re: More Eurobeebness
Jules Richardson wrote:
>> Speaking of batteries, I notice the venerable Varta Mempac has been put
out to pasture. Or so it seems - it's certainly not listed on their website
any more.
>
> That's what these ones are - with unusual levels of corrosion (normally
they seem to survive intact on classic systems a lot better than other sorts
of batteries for some reason)
They the blue-jacket ones (Nickel cadmium)?
I nicknamed them "fur batteries". Primarily because the seals are absolute
crap. You're lucky to get five years out of them, let alone 20.
The green-jacket (NiMH) ones are a little more robust, but if they're left
discharged for longer than a few months, the seal fails. Same symptoms as the
blue ones - "fur" growing on the cell.
Google for "Black Wire Disease" - it's a common affliction of nickel-chemistry
cells, apparently.
>> Only thing is I'll probably have to hack together a Eurocard backplane for
them - shame DIN41612 connectors are so expensive.
>
> Sure. I do have some scrap backplanes actually, that have apparently been
cut down from longer ones - so connections to supply rails would have to be
soldered on appropriately, but they'd do the job otherwise.
Ten minutes with a Stanley knife (why, to scrape the solder mask off, Officer,
what else would it be for?) and a soldering iron. I'd be tempted to gut a PC
motherboard for connectors and hook an AT power supply up to it.
My 6502 board uses an ATX PSU. Why? Why not? :)
Speaking of defective hardware, I need to find some way of getting in touch
with Lee Davison. He's still got my Jupiter Ace, I want it back, and he seems
to have changed from "still trying to fix it" to ignoring me completely...
> The CUBE boards are nicely self-contained though; CPU, RAM, ROM, serial and
parallel all on the same board - so with the MOS ROM, BBC BASIC, and a serial
terminal you're away (assuming you don't want graphics or to save anything to
disk :-)
Serial terminal, yep, got one of those. A Liberty Electronics "Freedom One
Plus". I still want a manual for that thing, but at least I've worked out the
Magic Incantations to pull up the configuration menu...
> Well I just tried one at random (a TI TBP28S42) and my programmer read it
fine. I just have no idea what format I'm best using to spit down the
programmer's serial line to my PC for archive purposes. All the formats I've
tried seem to be ASCII-encoded binary and look highly proprietary :-)
The TI programming algorithms are open IIRC - check www.ti.com. If you felt
particularly like indulging in a bit of self-torture, you *could* build your
own programmer.
"Could" is not necessarily synonymous with "should", of course.
>> Mark at Leopardcats has built a PAL cracker - see
http://www.leopardcats.com/oddities/palcracker/. It's based on a BBC Micro,
but he's only put the PLD source files on there - not the control program.
I've been meaning to ask him about it, actually...
>
> nice. I'm wondering what the board on top of the BBC in
'palcracker2_setup.jpg' is - there's a heck of a lot of roms on it, plus a
large IC (680x0?).
An arcade game board of some description by the looks of things.
>> Ooo, a multiuser RTOS for the 68k. Very neat.
>
> I badly need more info on my Cumana 68008 copro so I can get it to talk to
its hard disk properly - it boots OS-9 from the floppy OK, but it'd be nice to
get hard disk access working...
Cumana made coprocessors? I thought they only made floppy drives... That said,
I think they made a few SCSI cards for the Acorn RISC OS machines.
>> I really should spend some time writing the OS code for my 6502 board. An
IDE and FDD interface would be nice, too...
>
> SCSI. You need SCSI. Actually, give it a System bus and then you can use
System boards with it (and make a System hard disk interface :-)
I don't have any SCSI hard drives. All mine are IDE.
> [1] FLEX is the poorer cousin of OS-9, designed for 8-bit systems. AFAIK it
only runs on 6809 CPUs though (but CUBE sold more of them than they did 6502
boards)
I kinda liked Andre Fachat's OS/A65, but I don't feel like porting it and
designing an MMU for my 6502 board. Contiki looks interesting too, especially
TCP/IP, but I need to track down a 3Com 3C509B Ethernet card and extract some
ISA slot connectors from demised PC motherboards before I go and do that. A
hard drive and a bootloader might also be a good idea :)
--
Phil. | Kitsune: Acorn RiscPC SA202 64M+6G ViewFinder
philpem@... | Cheetah: Athlon64 3200+ A8VDeluxeV2 512M+100G
http://www.philpem.me.uk/ | Tiger: Toshiba SatPro4600 Celeron700 256M+40G