osiweb.org

Has anyone cloned the Ohio Scientific 560Z board? This is the CPU Expander that supports the Intersil IM-6100 PDP-8 on a chip. There's one in a lot of boards I'm looking at. I'd be willing to clone it and have more boards produced using Mile High Test to scan the board, as I did with the OSI 495 prototype board. If no one has cloned it, I assume people would like one?

I'd be willing to go in on the scanning cost, and then put the gerbers up for download. I'd also be good for at least one board if you do a run. This is something I've been interested in for a while.

I have a few other boards I'm planning on sending in to mile high as well. It would be great to be able to build up a complete system from gerbers.

Dave

I don't mind paying for the scanning cost as long as people are wanting to buy duplicate boards I'm also fine with putting the Gerbers up for free -- I'll probably put them on GitHub so they're not dependent on me, and try to get people to mirror them as well. I will probably do like I did with the OSI 495 board and add a "this is a reproduction" kind of message, so that they don't end up on eBay as the real thing or something.

Can you still get that Intersil chip?

If I remember correctly OSI used a 6502 in some freaky way to intercept the DMA so the chip thought it was talking to DEC peripherals so you'd need this software if it ever existed.

And the PDP-8? Ugh!

Got 'em! Soon, 560Z boards for all! I will put together a preorder for them (already have a small webapp that does preorders) and figure out how large the first run should be.

Excellent! I'm in. Let us know where to sign up for the preorder.

Dave

The 560Z board is off to Mile High Test! Expected to be in Friday, so I'll probably have Gerbers by Monday.

Interested here too but- does anyone have 560Z Operating System and Monitor ?

Are you doing a backplane and or RAM/IO board for the system bus side ?

I don't know of an actual OS for the PDP-8 side, or the Z80 for that matter. If nothing exists, I was thinking I would eventually write a soft front panel.

Yes, I've got blank 420 boards, plus I was planning on expanding my RAM board project to provide 12-bit support:

http://www.glitchwrks.com/2016/04/23/32k-ram-for-osi

I have a 2-slot "over the top" backplane bridge for the two-board hard disk controller set, I can copy that if there's a need for that connector with the 560Z board. I may also just build a "spud" RAM board that plugs into the end of the 560Z with no bridge board.

560Z Utility package source listing is on Dave's site : http://osiweb.org/manuals/560Z_software_listing.pdf

The software for the 560Z I/O requires 430 board TTY interface as is and appears to use OS65D v2.0 vectors ? (see $3BC6 table).
Or is C2 65D totally different from that for C4 etc.

Code is on C2 boot disks ??
Could modify for ACIA RS232 for 560Z terminal I/O