Processor Technology Sol Repairs... - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: bsudbrink
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: November 25, 2019, 02:36:07 am
content: A few weeks ago, when I was asking about commoning blocks, a few people asked me to share the results of my efforts when they were ready. So here they are.Replaced tantalum caps:1 on the NorthStar MDS-AD3 floppy controller.Replaced ICs:Keyboard: U12 (8334... my last one, got to order some more), U23 (74LS04)Display circuitry: U41 (74166), U61 (74LS10)Display memory: U17 (91L02A)<<For a while, I was very concerned that the character generator ROM (U25, MCM6575) was bad.>><<They are just about unobtainable.>>Compupro RAM 20: No bad components, but someone had "messed with" all of the configuration switches.IMS 16K RAM: U4 and UC (2114)Case open, front:Case open, back:SOLOS ROM monitor:CP/M (A little fuzzy, sorry):Running SPACE RAIDERS (a Space Invaders clone):

author: duak
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 08, 2019, 05:27:42 pm
content: A blast from the past! Good going! These things bring back memories. I'd like to think that all that time I spent farting about with micros helped me get my jobs and career path.In 1978 I cloned the Sol on a wire wrap card from a copy of the manual. For the monitor, I keyed in the hex for SOLOS and programmed it into a 2708 then debugged it all with a VOM - no scope. I think I was using an old MITS 4K DRAM card with TI 4K x 1 chips, all the timing set by monostables and lots of jumper wires. I kludged on another layer of DRAM chips to get 8K of memory, enough to run Processor Tech BASIC.That fall I started my professional career at a high tech company and soon struck up a friendship with a person who had both a Sol and an Imsai. We went together to buy copies of the space war and chess programs. I built a new processor card using a 5 MHz 8085 but using the Sol 64 x 16 display. I could run the space war program but it was too fast to actually play for long even on the lowest speed. I designed a 80 x 24 video card and wrote a monitor that wasn't compatible with the Sol and couldn't run Processor Tech software any more.Anyway, I found the space war program to be quite a bit of fun - what was it called? It used the characters in the text display in interesting ways to animate an arcade style game.

author: bsudbrink
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 10, 2019, 04:58:11 pm
content: I've never actually seen a character graphics implementation of Space War. I assume you mean the "classic" two player game that involved piloting ships around a "star", shooting torpedoes at each other. If you could somehow lay hands on it, I think a number of vintage computer enthusiasts would really appreciate it. The best repository of surviving Processor Tech software is:https://www.sol20.org/programs.html

author: duak
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 21, 2019, 01:47:18 am
content: The game I was thinking of wasn't the two player spacewar with orbiting craft.After some searching I found out It was called "target" and here's a video of it and was on one of the gamepacks.Have fun with the Sol,Cheers,