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Cromemco dazzler replica project

Hugo Holden said:
I only have the .jpg images I drew, but LD Electronics here in AU (a pcb maker) has the Gerbers and they will make the pcb's for any customers that require them. All the IC's are very easy to get, except the TMS3417 or F3342DC Shift Register. As I mentioned in my article the 74HCT7731 could be made to work I think with some re-wiring.
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I sent an email to LD Electronics asking whether they are able to manufacture a set of boards for me - haven't received a reply yet though.
Hugo - since this is your board design, I expect they may need to contact you to get your approval?
 
hmb said:
I sent an email to LD Electronics asking whether they are able to manufacture a set of boards for me - haven't received a reply yet though.
Hugo - since this is your board design, I expect they may need to contact you to get your approval?
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I mentioned to George at LD in the past that if anyone wanted the pcb's made that was ok with me, so he should remember that, but I guess if he didn't remember, he would email me.

I assume Cromemco published their pcb foil diagrams so that people could have had a go at making the pcb's for themselves at the time. But these days its pretty hard to beat modern factory quality pcb manufacture, it beats a home etch every time. The diagrams I gave George were just a cleaned up version of Cromemco's faded ones drawn as a .jpg.
 
Would be interesting to know what a set of boards would cost. While JCLPCB are great for a lot of things, the lack of hard gold fingers makes them unsuitable for S100 cards.
 
Gary C said:
Would be interesting to know what a set of boards would cost. While JCLPCB are great for a lot of things, the lack of hard gold fingers makes them unsuitable for S100 cards.
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LD Electronics responded to my inquiry, and quoted a price for the set of 2 Dazzler boards of $AUD 700.00, plus shipping.
 
Crikey £400 GBP,

Its a lot for hard gold edge connector but I have looked at quotes for a gerber file I have and the hard gold providers do charge a lot more for the process.
 
Good lord, the price of Gold must have gone up !

Maybe the old saying " Diamonds are a Girl's best friend" should be changed to "Gold S-100 pcb's are a Boy's best friend"

But on a sober note, the price does surprise me, because all the work is already done and the Gerbers exist now.

Maybe a quote without the Gold could help ?

But, it is always better to have the Gold, if you want a quality result.
 
The hard gold must cost more for the process as well as the material.

If you do a quote on pcbway for a 100mm x 100mm board it quotes $5, but click hard gold that jumps to $214 !
 
An S-100 card is 5"x10" (127x254mm in new money) - so twice as big - and I don't think that $5 is 'real' either...

I am just about to order my sockets Hugo (and some new solder - I have almost run out)...

Dave
 
I just used it as an example to show how much including hard gold fingers pushes up the price of an online ordered PCB. Of course they put postage on just like JCL.
 
Gary C said:
If you do a quote on pcbway for a 100mm x 100mm board it quotes $5, but click hard gold that jumps to $214 !
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PCBCART is $145 for qty 5 boards 127x254mm with gold edge fingers plus shipping.
 
djg said:
PCBCART is $145 for qty 5 boards 127x254mm with gold edge fingers plus shipping.
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I can't see hard gold option on their website, only ENGI ? and if you choose whole board ENGI with a thickness of 3-5um costs suddenly jump to $218 ?

Are the fingers hard gold ? Hard to tell from their website.
 
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Gary C said:
I can't see hard gold option on their website, only ENGI ? and if you choose whole board ENGI with a thickness of 3-5um costs suddenly jump to $218 ?

Are the fingers hard gold ? Hard to tell from their website.
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Use standard PCB quote and click additional options at the bottom. You can then enter gold fingers. When I asked a while ago they say its hard gold and claimed thickness was more than flash but don't remember what they said. I've been using one of the HASL options for the rest of the board. Didn't wear through quickly like the ENIG I used once but no way of checking thickness and haven't done a lot of insertions.

https://www.pcbcart.com/quote
 
I was very impressed with the quality of the LD boards, they are Gold on all pads , vias and fingers. Otherwise they are dead ringers for the originals except two small things:

I slightly moved the position of the video output connections to allow for the plastic slides in the Sol. Also, oddly, in the original boards, at least the Cromemco foil diagrams; there were some small geometry errors of the S-100 connection finger array, these got fixed.

Also, there are no known track errors on these LD pcb's. I fully tested them and found nothing had gone awry. This was because I stayed up many nights, burning the midnight oil, getting the replica artwork perfect and making 100% sure it matched the schematic, and it paid off, not having to fix any board errors.

Also for my replica I searched out the same physical size & frequency Xtal and its ceramic tuning capacitor to have everything as close as possible to the original.
 
djg said:
Use standard PCB quote and click additional options at the bottom. You can then enter gold fingers. When I asked a while ago they say its hard gold and claimed thickness was more than flash but don't remember what they said. I've been using one of the HASL options for the rest of the board. Didn't wear through quickly like the ENIG I used once but no way of checking thickness and haven't done a lot of insertions.

https://www.pcbcart.com/quote
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Sounds good.

I think I will try them next.
 
I just discovered Hugos Dazzler PDF on the internet. I was hoping someone recreated it. Now That I have a Cromemco system the idea of having real graphics out is appealing. So the original Fab in Australia still owns the gerbers? Has anyone else remade the card? This is pretty interesting knowing recreating the card is possible.
 
Hi,

I have a few extra blank DAZZLER II boards ... I should have one completely built hopefully, before Christmas. Car repair bills come first. I hope to build a 2nd one later as I already have most of the components.

Find me on my website: Brainless.org/Altair if you want a blank.
 
pbirkel@gmail.com said:
Modern functional equivalent: http://s100computers.com/My System Pages/Dazzler II Board/Dazzler_II Board.htm
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Just reading through that page:
The CPLD code in U3 and U1 is very complex. It was generated by converting the original TV Dazzler 74LSxx circuit to Atmel's WinCUPL code. This code was the extensively fine tuned to yield efficient code that would fit in two 1508's. Built into the code are various video test patterns to debug the board. For most users it's best to look upon U6, U3 and U1 as "black boxes".
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You know when John Monahan points to something and says "Here Be Dragons" there's some real hackery going on..
 
wperko said:
Hi,

I have a few extra blank DAZZLER II boards ... I should have one completely built hopefully, before Christmas. Car repair bills come first. I hope to build a 2nd one later as I already have most of the components.

Find me on my website: Brainless.org/Altair if you want a blank.
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Where did you get those blank boards, are they they originals from Cromemco from the late 1970's, that would be quite a find to have blank ones, or are they replicas of the ones I re-created ?

Be aware that there are two variants of the original Dazzler pcb set, the early and the late versions, my re-creations were the later versions, that had some problems removed by Cromemco.

Although these re-created boards I made, if supplied by LD. Electronics in AU, seem expensive, they are proven to work and are all Gold, better than the originals. If you price them, given that the $AUD is close to only 60% of the USD, you will find that per board, they are actually quite reasonably priced considering the number of IC's and tracks and the Gold.

I'm not a fan of the modern "functional equivalent" of the Dazzler with the CPLD (not to detract from the good work and creativity that designed it), but to me that is not "vintage computing" in the spirit of the original design architecture which has the power hungry 74 series TTL's of the 1970's ..80's era, that I have come to admire so much and is part of the vintage computer experience.

In my case I tend to design all of my vintage computer items with period correct IC's, rather than throwing Arduinos and other modern processor cores at them. I try to avoid the "Dragons".
 
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