What exactly do I have????

[DistantStar001]

I recently came across four boards to what I'm guessing is some sort of computer, but what computer, I have no idea.

The first is a Z80 CPU board:

The second looks to be either an I/O or Video board, not sure which:

The third has both RAM and ROM (I've removed a leaking battery, but it might still work):

And the last might be an input board?


I got them for parts, but figured I should identify them first. Any ideas?

 

[Bruce Tomlin]

Dump the roms and we can find out.

 

[DistantStar001]

Dump the roms and we can find out.

Okay… So here they are (maybe?)

I've never dumped a PROM before, nor am I sure that the Promenade C1 I used with my C64 is fully functional. I mean the C64 is, but I'm still learning about the Promenade.

Also, I zipped them into a single folder, so hopefully that works.

Also-also, they're numbered from the card edge on out.

 

[seat safety switch]

ROMs 5 and 6 have some interesting strings in them which makes me think they're potentially part of some kind of industrial control system:

POWER LOST FOR >1 MINUTE. AUTO-HOLD/STOP FLOW!
%C ILLEGAL IN A 2 PUMP SYSTEM
WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF PROCESS CONTROL!

 

[cjs]

The second card is almost drives a video display and reads a keyboard. The 6845 is a very common video display support chip, and the μPD8279 is a keyboard and LED display chip. No doubt the two-row .1" header at the upper right is the keyboard connector, and I would guess the two connectors at the lower right (I can't see what type they are) are some sort of video output.

 

[cjs]

ROMs 5 and 6 have some interesting strings in them which makes me think they're potentially part of some kind of industrial control system...

Yup, looks like it. Something that uses pumps.

Here's the complete strings file for all the ROMs, concatenated.

 

[cjs]

I've dropped the ROMs and photos, along with a README describing what we know of the system (and with some links to datasheets) in the Retroabandon embedded-re repo under proc-cont-3-pump/. This will be pretty easy to disassemble if you want, though I'm feeling it may not be worthwhile if you're just going to strip the boards for parts.

If you do want to actually try to bring it up, it needs a bit of disassembly to figure out where the various bits are and then probably wants a port of tmon, which should fit nicely into the remaining 2K of ROM address space implied by the one set of unpopulated pads to the right of the seven installed ROMs. (The first ROM would also probably need to be replaced with a slightly rewritten version that starts tmon; from tmon you can jump back to the original code if you want to start that.)

 

[Bruce Tomlin]

obligatory quick disassembly