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Altair 8800 Micro prototype

Looks very very nice Vince.
Being a sucker for Altair stuff I need to get one myself.

/Pontus
 
Looks very nice, Vince! Any chance of finding a miniature case with a closer-to-original aspect ratio (width-to-length). Maybe it's the photo, but the current one seems to my eye not to be quite tall enough.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Looks very nice, Vince! Any chance of finding a miniature case with a closer-to-original aspect ratio (width-to-length). Maybe it's the photo, but the current one seems to my eye not to be quite tall enough.
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Boy, tough crowd; picky, picky... ;-)
 
Looks great! Is it still programmable from scratch or will it always auto load the bootstrap and basic? Too late in the design maybe but what about a toggle for those folks who want the pain^H^H^Hleasure of coding it up themselves? Though I completely agree that for less advanced folks like myself your term doing it would make it immediately usable for the majority.
 
barythrin said:
Looks great! Is it still programmable from scratch or will it always auto load the bootstrap and basic? Too late in the design maybe but what about a toggle for those folks who want the pain^H^H^Hleasure of coding it up themselves? Though I completely agree that for less advanced folks like myself your term doing it would make it immediately usable for the majority.
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Great questions. Probably not on the case, this one fit the budge and was as close to aspect ratio as I could get. I would have liked it to be 4" tall, instead of a 3" panel but it works out. Funny thing is, there is the potential to paint these blue to match but I'm going to leave that up to the individual user to customize.

Still programmable from scratch, however, right now I only have room for the onboard terminal, not an external serial port. I have so many ports out the back, there is no more room for a DB9! Look at the photos and there is a DC connector, SD card slot, VGA port, composite output rca connector and ps/2 keyboard connector. So, what I am thinking of doing is some small mod board that will put a riser card ontop of the propeller terminal chip and allow you to disable the onboard terminal. Then you can connect it to a pc or external terminal and do bootloading the old school way!

With my last design concept I tried this with a Z80 until I found issues with BASIC :0 Long story short, it was fun at first always entering the bootloader, but it got old fast. Here's the current setup and how you fire it up:

To get the terminal to request a file load, AUX switch needs to be up on power up. If switch 11 is also up, (similar to the original way BASIC detected the SIO2) it will ask for a file name to load. if switches 14, 12, 10, and 8 are up and 15, 13, 11, and 9 are down along with AUX up, this is a special mode to do a flash update. If you just want to jump into the front panel and start programming from there on power up, just make sure the AUX switch is down.

To save memory at any point, switch to stop, turn up AUX and PROTECT and then press STEP. This goes into a file storage mode and just give the filename and it will store all memory onto SD card in that name in 30 seconds or less.

Debug mode is used to display all the registers and stack pointer memory and memory location while stepping through your program. I have not made a switch function to turn on/off this feature, I'll work on this later, it was a great feature for debugging code in the beginning.

Breakpoint address mode. Yeah, this is one I made up that definately is not on the Altair but is a great tool. When this mode is enabled by having PROTECT and AUX up while RUNNING, the CPU will halt on the address on the front panel switches. Really handy when running through a program that has several repeated loops to another section.

I still have about 25% of the AOAC (Altair On A Chip) AVR programming space left for added features, bug fixes, etc. I'm going to try and leave 20% for adding stupid fun stuff like, hey, let's make it do the cylon eye or night rider look.

More to come, just found a little bug in the status display.

Vince
 
The first batch of Altair 8800 micro's is now sold out. We are starting on the next run that should be ready in about 6 weeks (front panel production takes 4-6 weeks). The first batch is being prepped for shipping starting this weekend. I'll update with photo's of the new silkscreened front panel and the rear brushed aluminum panel soon.

Vince
 
The Altair 8800 micro is now working with 16K BASIC and work is beginning on CP/M. We should have this working by early next year. CP/M will be the final piece to making the Altair micro a complete system.

Vince
 
Somehow I missed this thread - well done!

Although there's probably decent software available to simulate a computer, I can't think of a better way for a young person who really wanted to understand how a computer worked than to pick up one of these machines.
 
Work is being done so you can interface to your PC and run SIMH emulator and control the program with the switches. So, you can have the best of both worlds.
 
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