Superboard II owner and replica creator

[vbriel]

I've owned my Superboard II for a few years and I've wanted to recreate it. I'm in the process now and have a working wirewrap version. I can boot and run BASIC just fine, I still need to implement the serial port for file transfers. Maybe later I'll work on the disk controller interface. Are there images of floppies out there? I don't have a 610 board on my Superboard II so I don't have any disk experience with this machine.

Here's some pictures of my work so far. Still a long way to go.




Doing a full sized keyboard will be difficult because of cost to make one, but I have some buttons with caps that will work pretty good. I'm also working on a ps/2 keyboard interface.

The machine currently has a 65C02 running at 3.3V with Parallax Propeller emulating 25x25 (32x32 memory space) and ROM. I have 1 SRAM using 32K from 000-7FFF. I did the circuit at 3.3V because the Propeller runs at 3.3V and it was just easier to use a WDC 65C02 at 3.3V than use 24+resistors and keep the whole thing at 5V. There is still 5V onboard for anything I need to add later like a max232 and ps/2 keyboard. I'm trying to make kits so people can build them like the 70's.

Let me know what you guys think,

Vince

[dave]

Vince,

This is awesome!

The disk interface itself is less of an issue than finding working disk drives and usable floppies. I do have some working disks for the C1, and there are disk images (essentially raw dumps) for the C1 in Mark S's emulator package (http://osi.marks-lab.com/).

I would like to find a standard way to archive images and help people bring up their old systems, so it would be really nice to find a way to replace the old OSI drives. I think that with a propeller already on board, it would be easiest to just emulate the 6850 and 6821 chips in software, and directly map the bytestream to image files in a standard format. However, systems without a propeller on board would either require a replacement disk controller, or would require capturing the modulated bit stream and drive control lines, recovering the data, and then mapping to a standard format; this could be accomplished with a fast mcu (such as a propeller), or a FTDI usb chip, with a server (perhaps in python) running on a modern computer.

Something that could leverage XML or JSON tools, for example.

You may also want to check out Gary Becker's FPGA implementaion: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osi_fpga/

And Jeff's online emulator, which I believe does translate raw images into JSON for the emulator: http://jsmachines.net/devices/c1p/

Dave

[vbriel]

Nothing new to report, the board is working, just figuring out configurations and odds and ends before I make a prototype PCB batch.

[dave]

That's awesome, Vince! I've been moving and have only intermittent internet access for a few more days, so I've been a bit out of touch. I can't wait to see the final design!