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Stuart's system

A project log for Applix 1616 Documentation

OCRd and typeset as html where possible. A work in progress.

keithKeith 10/21/2023 at 15:060 Comments

Stuart is restoring a 1616 machine and documenting his progress at:

https://forum.acms.org.au/t/retrochallenge-2023-10-applix1616-restoration-documentation/503/4

He has read the PAL chips using a ChipTester V2 Pro from BackBit.io and I eagerly await looking at them. I don't know whether the security bits were blown or not. If they were, one can only make a best guess by examining the behaviour. 

There is a project that tries to dump PAL contents. Easily done for combinatorial chips, less so for registered chips. 

See: https://github.com/DuPAL-PAL-DUmper

I don't know how clever it is, or how reliable the output.

Worst case, I could make a best guess replacement and ask Cefiar to try them out.

His system has:

Both SCSI and floppy discs are obsolete, and I am not very motivated to reverse engineer the PALs although they should be fairly simple to do.

The motherboard PALs are registered and harder to reverse engineer. I can't scope his system (and nor can he) but I think I could make a good guess at the 68000 DRAM interface by scoping my Atari ST here.

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