From: Anders Carlsson (anders.carlsson_at_sfks.se)
Date: 2007-03-29 08:54:06
Bil Herd wrote:
> How did it get to Sweden? We sent it there through Sig Hartman's
> Software/Games group most likely.
Ah, the picture is slowly clearing up. The reseller also had a
software company who developed software for Handic/Datatronic.
How many titles they finished and got sold, I don't know, but
I've found a couple of empty VIC-20 cartridge boards which hold
two TMS2516/2716/2532/2732 (*) chips each. Two of them had EPROMs
onboard, containing some home-made Basic extension and other software.
(*) Yes, I know that 2532 has a different pinout than the others, but
for some reason it seems all four types of EPROMs work in the socket.
Maybe the pins that differ are not important when you only read it.
It is fully possible that Datatronic received these TED boards for
software development, and it sifted through to 3rd party developers,
either then or a few years later, when Plus/4 not was hot anymore.
He once mentioned how Datatronic dumped unwanted, obsolete goods on
him... the joy of being a premium business partner, I presume.
> The odds are that this is a PAL version though we were probably
> sending out monitors also to support NTSC so it could go either way.
There is a switch on the RF modulator. As I wrote earlier, PAL machines
usually are not switchable to which channel they use (UHF 36) unlike
NTSC which lets you choose between channels 3 and 4. Of course since
this is a development board, the switch could be a dummy on the boards
that are set up for PAL.
As regarding to the physical dimensions, it is roughly 2/3 of the
width of a C64 motherboard. Had it been full size, I may not even
have detected it.
> Let me know you need help getting that software-developer TED working.
Well, if U4 should hold a specially programmed 82S100 PLA, we still
need to determine if U9 needs to contain something special, whether
it is another EPROM, a 6551 (?), RAM etc.
Regards
--
Anders Carlsson
Message was sent through the cbm-hackers mailing list
Archive generated by hypermail pre-2.1.8.