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Rockwell RM 65 Family (AIM 65) Development system?

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gslick said:
There is nothing about the RM 65 edge connector version boards that is STD Bus.

RM 65 Edge Connector version:
Width: 3.9 inch
Length: 6.5 inch
Edge Connector: 72-pin, 0.100 inch spacing

STD Bus:
Width: 4.5 inch
Length: 6.5 inch
Edge Connector: 56-pin, 0.125 inch spacing
Click to expand...

The difference is the eurocard version has (E) in the name. I suppose you'd need to match the names with a STD bus.

On 1-3

29650N82 RN65 Bus Description

I guess if you had the STD version you'd need that document.

Dwight
 
Last edited:
gslick said:
Page 1-2 of what, this manual?

vintagecomputer.ca/files/Rockwell/AIM65/RM65%20General%20Purpose%20Input%20Output%20and%20Timer%20Module%20Users%20Manual.pdf

The Edge Connector Version of the RM 65 Bus cards are visually similar to STD Bus cards, but that's about it.

Might as well call Motorola EXORbus cards S-100 bus cards because they are visually similar at a gross level.
Click to expand...

The board was available in both versions see my post right before yours.
Note in the manual the picture on 1-2 and my reference on 1-3. Also on page 2-2 you can see the STD card is pictured. The same manual was used for both versions. They did the same for all of the various cards.
Dwight
 
I know the RM 65 Bus cards were available in both 64-pin Eurocard versions, and 72-pin Edge Connector versions.

They weren't available in "STD Bus" versions, which has a specific meaning.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STD_Bus

If your usage of "STD" in this context just means an edge connector version, that is not entirely obvious, and somewhat confusing.
 
gslick said:
I know the RM 65 Bus cards were available in both 64-pin Eurocard versions, and 72-pin Edge Connector versions.

They weren't available in "STD Bus" versions, which has a specific meaning.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STD_Bus

If your usage of "STD" in this context just means an edge connector version, that is not entirely obvious, and somewhat confusing.
Click to expand...

I was wrong, I don't know why I had that impression. I have a couple Prolog STD bus systems, it wouldn't have taken much to realize that they were completely different.
I'm eating crow for diner.
Dwight
 
Have you powered up either of the AIM65s to see what they have in their ROMs. The basic AIM65 came with either BASIC or Forth but there were a lot of enhancement ROMs for them. There might be enough useful stuff on www.6502.org.
Looking at the floppy disk controller, it has a nice ROM with utilities like formatting to get a blank disk started.
Dwight
 
Hi snuci
Looking at your pictures, it looks like the mounting for the power supply got bent. I don't think it hurt anything electrical but make sure the AC wiring doesn't have any issues.
Dwight
 
Dwight Elvey said:
Have you powered up either of the AIM65s to see what they have in their ROMs. The basic AIM65 came with either BASIC or Forth but there were a lot of enhancement ROMs for them. There might be enough useful stuff on www.6502.org.
Looking at the floppy disk controller, it has a nice ROM with utilities like formatting to get a blank disk started.
Dwight
Click to expand...

I will see if I can take a look this weekend as I haven't had time to play with it yet and am busy this weekend too. I did see the power supply standoffs had bent in shipping. There's lots of room around it to not cause any issues but I need to straighten the bottom enclosure plate to make the power supply stand up properly :) Thanks for pointing that out anyway.
 
I was looking at the manuals on ebay. There is a typical manual for the I/O board but there is also another manual that looks like it is for an I/O related ROM? I'm curious as to what that is about? Is it something for the AIM or something to go no the RM65 ROM board?
I'm also looking to see the 32K RAM manual and the ACIA manual.
Dwight
 
Dwight Elvey said:
Once you get the AIM working with the bus, you might want to look into the DOS work that Dallas Shell has done:
http://6502.org/users/dallas/SYM/SYMDOS2/symdos2.htm
I suspect it can be adapted to the RM65 floppy controller.
Dwight
Click to expand...
It is possible that this isn't as practical. I was looking at your Floppy controller board and the FDC manual. Your board has the AIM65 R324E ROM on it. That is the AIM65 DOS ROM. I'm not sure what my FDC card has but I suspect it is the R14C5 ROM. This is different and only has basic disk access code in it.
One wonders if anyone has a disk image of the AIM65 DOS disk? It may be that, looking at the manual, one might be able to create one from the ROM.
Dwight
 
Hi Dwight,

Both AIM 65s have BASIC 1.1 The power supply covers some of the ROM chips and I don't know how to access all of them so it's hard to check if there are others. I'd have to take them apart. Is there an easy way to check what ROMs might be in it?

I have the 32K RAM manual scanned but haven't had a chance to massage it and put the pages in order. I will post that in a few days. I am stuck on a home project that is taking up all of my time at the moment. Sorry for not replying sooner.
 
I know what you mean about home projects. This weekend, I was doing painting outside with the temperature between 88 and 92 F. At least it was dry but I drank a lot of water.
I was cleaning one of my rollers ( to save a trip to the hardware store ) and had the hose on jet. It spun up really fast and now I have polkadot shoes.
Much of the rest of the weekend was sitting in my chair recovering.
I'm just curious about that manual that says:

RM65
MICRO COMPUTER
MODULE FAMILY
RM65-0110
INPUT/OUTPUT ROM
USER's MANUAL

I don't need that manual copied, I'm mostly curious as to what is in it?
Like, what is an input/output ROM?

As for the ROMs on the AIMs, I suppose you'd have to look under the power supply's or power them up and do a memory dump, looking for ASCII strings. I don't recall how many ROMs the AIM uses for BASIC.
For the AIM DOS, it looks like most if not all of the functions are in the ROM on the FDC card. You might read the parts of the FDC manual that explain how to use it.
Dwight
 
Is there a binary dump of the RM-65 FDC 090 1.0 R324E-11 ROM already available somewhere? If not it would be great to get a dump of that ROM.

The RM-65 FDC that I have came with a custom 4KB EPROM that doesn't appear to match either the R14C5 FDC Primitive Routines 2KB ROM, or the R324E AIM 65 DOS 1.0 4KB ROM.

From looking at a hex dump of the 4KB EPROM I have it appears to mostly match the RM 65 FDC Firmware, Revision 2.0, May 18, 1982 source code listing in the back of the FDC manual starting at location $886C, except that it is missing the copyright message string at the end of the EPROM. In addition there is code starting at $8000 which doesn't quite look like it would be the AIM 65 DOS ROM code that would be initialized by executing the startup routine using <*>=8000 and <G>/. as described in the FDC manual. It's been a while since I looked at the hex dump I have, I forget why I came to the conclusion that it wasn't the standard AIM 65 DOS ROM.
 
I just checked mine and confirmed that mine is the FDC 2.0 R14C5-11 date code 8301. I think we all three need to do dumps to see what goodies we have.
My address decoder PAL has 493-R23-002 stamped on it. I was careful to not modify the selection switches on anything ( being that I didn't have most of the manuals ). It seems that the ROM on my board was originally disabled. It makes me wonder a little about the code on the CPU board. I suspect it may part mapped to the disk. I'll need to look at my ROMs on the CPU some more. When looking at the code, it seems it had a video board of some type. The CPU ROMs I have are mostly fig Forth with some specialized code for the ICE software. I've made a few modification to boot with the KEY and EMIT using the serial I/O but haven't got around to testing it out yet.
I'm suspecting it may have formatted the floppy disk with the same format as used for the AIM DOS, rather than the use the disk for screens as shown in the FDC manual. This would explain using a different ROM because it would not be connected to a AIM65. I'll need to look at things some more.
It sounds like all three of use need to read out our ROMs. I doubt my ROMs binary it on the web either.
Dwight

Dwight
 
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