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Neat Intel ICE Machine

rico

rico

Experienced Member
Joined
Dec 16, 2025
Messages
56
Please let me know a better place to put this. I like trawling for sale ads and FB marketplace.
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I thought this was especially neat and seemingly rare. I can’t find any images of the ICE nor can I find an active one. But figured someone here might know what it is, want it or just to say look at this neat thing.

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Closest thing I found was a diagram on page 22 of the MCS-48 datasheet.


So to all, what is this thing? Is it an In circuit emulator? Is this thing rare or worth nabbing? Does someone actively collect things of this nature. It is neat, I’ll give it that.
 
To me it seems some sort of MCS-48 SDK. So a testing environment to test microcontroller development with the help of an auxiliary computer. In other words, it is the equivalent to the MCS-85 for the 8048 family.
The other sockets might be for extending the microcontroller program externally by the use of a short socket (EPROM) or by means of a mixed-purpose IC, like the 8355/8755. On the DIP-40 ZIF there's an annotation that seems to be "8155", so I quess they also extended its RAM using this method, as the internal one was very limited.

So, about rarity... I don't know. It might by because I'm a certain region, but until this week I hadn't seen Intel hardware in person. So I have never seen one of those. Also, I haven't seen this device before even in pictures. But again, it might be my fault for being in a certain geographical region.

My piece of advice... if the price isn't abusive (I don't know it), you might want to grab it. It is certainly a nice piece of history for a very special line of microcontrollers - remember that they were in the model F keyboards after the Datamaster (actually that computer uses various at various places).

If you actually got it, you would have the moral obligation to dump the contents of the internal microcontroller. Among other things because a backup would be required to restore the system in case the microcontroller fails in the future or to assist other people with the same device.

Note also that this system has been tampered, it can be observed by the lack of two screws in the blue part of the case. So missing or faulty parts can be a pissibility and therefore a risk.

Other than that, the machine looks very neat!
 
@Al Kossow
I don't think there's anything wrong by describing something you haven't seen before and to try to discern what it is. After all we don't know what we don't know.
This is part of the learning process.
For this reason, I would like to ask you for patience, please.
 
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