Recent content by lowen

This binary is the z80ctl program for Tandy's Xenix System III for the Tandy 6000. This is the code that turns the Model II/12 Z80 computer into an I/O coprocessor for the 68000 CPU. This particular binary supports the so-called 'mux' boards, multiplier serial cards. There were two different...

IDA is an excellent disassembler. The NSA's open source and cross-platform Ghidra reverse engineering tool supports the Z80, among many others, including 8080, 8085, 6502, and 68000. Of course x86 is supported. This technique was fairly common back in the day. I wrote my own disassembler...

Ah, z80ctl for the MUX boards.... So, my analysis would start at the boot. Reconstructed Model II ROM source in several versions can be found at https://electrickery.nl/comp/trs80m2/trs80m2boot.zip which you probably already have. Reading this source, for hard disk boot, 512-byte sectors are...

SGI made the Prism, based on Altix 3000 series Itanium systems. Ran Linux, not IRIX. A Prism Extreme maxed out with 256 processors would have been (and would STILL be) a sweet system.

Hmmm....deja vu Yeah, I know, different terminology.

What size CF card? DOS 3.3 has some pretty small size limits for both the disk and for partitions: 504MB total for the disk and 32MB for partitions. It almost sounds like the partition isn't being marked as a boot partition.

"What is vintage?" is simply whatever a significant enough percentage of user's thinks is vintage, where "significant enough" is decided by the moderators. There are neither time-based nor tech-based easy hard dividing lines that could command a consensus.

MCA.... Whee. I have quite a few Ethernet cards for MCA, Cabletron and 3Com mostly. I'll have to dig the box out to see.

I like this better, thanks for the effort.

If you do the hard work it is, but there are chips and modules for that now. For instance: https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264 GPIO, I2C, SPI: those cover the use cases.

TRS-80's use a 50-pin interface, but it's the external expansion bus interface on the Model III and 4. Has its own part number: WD1000-TB1

That's what I've been doing lately as well.

....but I do have a pair of populated ones....wrap side on top, component side on bottom.... (Yes, that's a pair of SGI O2's underneath....one works, the other doesn't)

That certainly makes it less annoying to me.

And that's a great segue to the most fun ISA cards I've ever had, and I've had several of this kind. First kind: The second kind, similar in function, were wire wrap panels.... don't have any blank ones of those left, unfortunately.