Also, how the heck am I meant to generate address strobe from a 68060?

So I’m slightly stumped on the Casablanca reverse engineering.

There’s four signals on the expansion bus that are generated by a single PAL.

This PAL uses the SIZ0, SIZ1 signals as well as A0 and A1 to generate the four signals.

There’s also another signal (DS?) from another CPLD on the board.

So… what could those four signals be? Something akin to UDS and LDS maybe?

Another day and another bit of reverse engineering of the Casablanca. I’ve beeped out the vast majority of the 96 pin expansion port from the main board to the video board.

As expected, 90% of it is just data lines, address lines, as well as power rails - with a few smatterings of control signals in there as well.

The next question is what the 12 or so remaining signals actually do. Three I’m fairly confident are interrupts, whilst the rest I’m not so sure. Supposedly the 68060 interface is based off an accelerator Macrosystem designed for the Amiga A3000, so it wouldn’t surprise me if the mystery signals are just DSACK, AS, DS, BERR and maybe an E clock

Also tried the 68060 in the scrapablanca, and it works perfectly!

Well. Seems I’ve ended up with three 68060s!

Two 68LC060s and a full blown 68060

Interestingly enough, the Casablanca ROM still has the retina drivers in it for an actual graphics card!

What does “Ion auf eine Kugel” even mean??

Orrrrr I could just load the disk image that Adrian (from Adrian’s Digital Basement) uploaded to the internet archive.

Lobbed onto a bluescsi, and it booted right away!

The first step is going to be to write some new install disks for it, just to make sure the entire thing does work as expected. Thankfully the hackspace has a greaseweazle I can use.

Step after that is going to be to try and figure out how to add a clockport to this thing, before finally adding an A314 for some RTG graphics

Also this is undoubtedly a hangover from the Amiga - the floppy disk clicks away unless a disk is inserted!

The Macrosystem Scrapablanca lives!

The system is such a weird thing. It’s basically a cut down macrosystem Draco, which in of itself was a clone of the Amiga A3000.

They took the RTC out, and it appears they use a PIC instead (counting from the line frequency?). Also for saying this is a video editor, they took the *entire video card out*

Sometimes I know what I’m doing.

This is the main CPU board and video board from a Macrosystem Casablanca. This thing is so cursed - if it doesn’t see a 50hz signal from the mains, it doesn’t fire up.

So one 555 timer, and poking around to find the power button signal, and adding a transistor to switch the main PSU on - and it seems to work!

It is not good for Tektronix 4010s vector graphics terminals to be left on their own, they are very social terminals, if possible, give them a lil friend

#tektronix #tektronix4010 #tektronix4006 #vintageComputing #retrocomputing

No 1.44mb support at the moment - but that’s just a technical issue rather than a hardware issue. I’ll imagine it should come out soon enough!

Alex of Apple Lisa fame has done it again!

It looks like there’s now a new floppy emulator for Apple computers!

It’s able to emulate a 400k, 800k, Twiggy (!) and HD20 drives.

Emphasis on the drives - depending on the drive type, it can support multiple disks images. I.E, two 5.25” drives, or two twiggy disks, or four HD20 drives. All off a low cost ESP32! There is no CPLD in sight!

https://tinkerdifferent.com/threads/esfloppy-an-open-source-floppy-emulator-for-mac-lisa-apple-ii-and-apple.5726/

Ah I love the process of trying to reverse engineer a complete black box of a PCB

I like how a project has gone from “this is probably impossible” to “hang on I just need to figure out where the int6 pin is”

Related - does anyone happen to have a schematic for an Amiga A500 clockport adapter?

Christ why are people so allergic of exporting schematics as a PDF. I’m not spinning up kicad just to check a bloody design!