• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Microkit 8/16

I am working on an adapter. I have also been playing around with the 'reader' I found for my dg unit (not with the Microkit EPROM but with a bunch of known good spare EPROMs from other machines).. I think we may be able to just dump the whole thing tonight if I can get it fully working.
 
falter said:
BTW, I've posted a couple pics of the keyboard out of case for those curious:
Click to expand...

Got around to looking at your pictures tonight.
That is a Keytronic reed-switch keyboard. The holes in the bottom of the board have two leads coming out for the reed switches
That keyboard should last forever..
 
Al Kossow said:
Got around to looking at your pictures tonight.
That is a Keytronic reed-switch keyboard. The holes in the bottom of the board have two leads coming out for the reed switches
That keyboard should last forever..
Click to expand...

Thanks Al! I didn't know Keytronic produced anything other than the foam capacitive versions.

Wish I could findn the software.
 
I rigged up a tape deck with the dg 8080 OS tape. No hope of that working but I wanted to see if any reaction occurred when attempting to load. The screen cleared when I hit play.

Still hunting like mad for a Microkit tape, but given the low serial on this machine im not hopeful. I wrote the company in case someone has an old archive of it there but so far no dice.
 
falter said:
I wrote the company
Click to expand...

The only hope you'd have there is contacting one of the Microkit founders.
This IS something from 1975 and the company was sold multiple times.
I really doubt anything from these first machines has survived. There are
even very few of the much better known Genrad systems.

As soon as I can get back into the building at work, I have multiple sets of the later boards with floppy support that should work in your backplane.
 
Yeah I'll have to try that... I'm not sure who the founders are but I'll try doing a search.

I've always accepted that anything earlier than mid 76 is tricky like this. I've become a lot more conscious too of the need to archive stuff... any time I get new software now I try to make a point of imaging it and then reaching out to see where it is needed/wanted.
 
he is also 85 now

Bruce E. Gladstone has been a director of Qualstar since 1994. In 1997, Mr. Gladstone was founder of ComCore Semiconductor, a manufacturer of fabless semiconductors, and served as its Vice President and a director from 1997 until 1998. From 1996 until 1997, Mr. Gladstone was a consultant in the area of high technology startup companies. In 1990, Mr. Gladstone co-founded Chronology Corporation and served as an executive officer and director from 1990 until 1995. During the period 1974 through 1990, Mr. Gladstone founded and served as chief executive officer or president of three companies providing electronic engineering and software development tools. Mr. Gladstone began his career in electrical engineering and received B.S. and M.S. degrees in Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1957 and 1962.
 
Thanks Al. I found an email for Qualstar. His name disappears from later SEC filings, but I figure if anyone knows how to reach him it might be them. There's a lot of Bruce Gladstones out there so locating other ways might be tough.
 
Hi, joining this very interesting thread after watching the Youtube video.

The reverse engineering work on the PROM with two missing bits is really amazing !! BTW @daver2 can post your disassembly work? I would like to give a look at it.

The manual says the tape is "2000 bps" and "phase encoded (harvard)" with "16 bit checksum"... it is somewhat similar to the Tarbell format.

We could attempt to manually craft a tape from a .WAV file... but there are too many variables that are unknown. My fear is that even with the PROM dump we might not be able to fill all the gaps, because certain details of the tape format might be hidden behind the tape controller.

My first guess for the tape format is:

header -- a certain number of filling characters, either 00, FF or 80
BOT (byte) -- beginning of record marker
startaddress (word) -- memory address where to load the file
length (word) -- file length
data bytes (n bytes)
checksum (word)

About the "redudancy" mentioned in the manual, I have no clue how is achieved.

But suppose we succeed loading a file... what test program do we load first? we need something short and that produces some effect without crashing (a video fill or similar).
 
Sorry Falter, I missed your post #63 way back in July...

Thanks fir getting out the other ‘half’ of the EPROM.

Unfortunately, one of my earlier posts identified that there are too many missing bits to fully disassemble the code. With the VDU displaying 64 out of the 256 characters, this gives me 25% of lost data. The instructions seem to disassemble OK (this is just a logical puzzle); but the immediate data values are a bit more of a challenge.

However, I will see if I can find my disassembler spreadsheet and enter the other half of the EPROM and see what it tells us.

Dave
 
Dave,

Do you also have a 68000 disassembler?

I'm trying to figure out how the Tektronix 4041 UTILITY ROM detects that one of the Option ROMs contains a PROM file system (my post Looking for 68000 disassembler help)

Sorry for the interruption - now back to the Microkit 8/16 discussion.

Monty
 
Hi Monty,

I don't have a 68K disassembler - but I would generally download something and use it as appropriate. There are a number of online websites I use (for example https://onlinedisassembler.com/static/home/index.html).

The issue is mainly how a disassembler handles data - and how possible it is to specify a region of data to the disassembler not to confuse it!

Dave
 
Thanks Dave! Sorry I've dropped off on the Netronics setup! Work + covid have made things a little crazy.

I appreciate your efforts with this. I actually bought a 1702 reader kit board that I'm collecting parts for, so if we cannot get further there is always that. In the meantime I've reached out all over the place including genrad/successors but sadly no luck on software so far. Haven't found a single other collector who has one of these.
 
>>> Work + covid have made things a little crazy.

Same problem here...

>>> Haven't found a single other collector who has one of these.

Which is probably why we should have a good go at getting it to work for history... More rare than an Apple 1 - so must be worth more :)!

I am hunting around for my spreadsheet and test files. Not found any as of yet though... I have found a picture of the first VDU screen image - which I would have entered the characters from. I have also found some other papers in the same pile.

I will carry on hunting...

Dave
 
Now that I've got a real 1702a eprom board for my digital group machine as part of that kit of parts I bought, I'm wondering how hard it would be to reverse engineer it and use it to dump the eprom from the Microkit? Unfortunately the card seems to have been a rare item and I've not found documentation for it. And digital group machines aren't plug n play.. you usually have to wire the slot you plug them into.

Had a close call with the Microkit software.. someone found a tape they thought had Microkit stuff on it.. but it was overwritten. :( Someday..
 
Hmm.. actually it kinda looks like the eprom board would fit into one of the RAM slots. I wonder how it gets the -9V though..
 
I can't answer that question though.

Is there a -9V generator on the board?

Presumably you can follow the -9V pin(s) from the EPROM to where it is sourced from - and see where it takes you...

I have just come across my spreadsheet disassembler - so I have printed out your second screen of text and started to enter it.

I don't think that it will still get me very far, but you never know...

Dave
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top