S-100 Bus

You can probably get away without the mass storage controller, at least initially. I think you need the rest, though.

Of all the cool vintage S-100 bits that I think I'd jettison first, the mass storage controller would be on top of the list -- make a card that reads files off of a thumb drive while faithfully emulating a tape reader, instead.

Unless you WANT to mess around with reviving some 8" floppy drive, that is.

--
Tim Wescott 
Control systems, embedded software and circuit design 
I'm looking for work!  See my website if you're interested 
http://www.wescottdesign.com

Yeah, no thanks to that one, I guess.

I'll have to do some research on the tech, it's a bit before my time. So all these Z80 CPU boards and 64K ram boards filled with dozens of DIP ICs and TO-3 voltage regulators are mutually compatible? Just snap em into some surplus PSU and backplane and you're most of the way there?

I've always wanted a 6809 with a bunch of RAM. Halt and catch fire!

Look at this behemoth:

67 pounds, I don't really have room for it.

I'll tell my girlfriend that she'll need to keep it in her living room, or else the relationship probably isn't going to work out.

Depending on the card(s), as little as a CPU card and power supply.

Of course, it depends on what you want to *do* with that "system". If you just want some blinkenlites...

CPU, a few K of RAM, some non-volatile storage that's not some dinosaur from 1973, and something that can send terminal commands out via RS-232 might be a nice start.

Why would you want to?! - if you can get a big stack of boards for scrap money, there might be a few components worth harvesting.

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i think compact flash will be easier to implement

Not easy. CF uses the 80286 bus signalling scheme, aka IDE or PATA. It's slightly adaptable, to 8088, but NOT really good for 8080 and Z80 and such.

On the bright side, if you COULD get it to work, that means almost all PATA devices could be adapted. I've got some older machines using PATA flash disks, it works out just fine. Alas, real PATA hardware is no longer mass-manufactured. CF is nearly dead, too.

If you don't mind modifying the S100 boards, the three-terminal 5V regulators can be replaced with more energy-efficient switchmode gizmos in the same package. Then you could ditch the hulking-capacitors 8VDC unregulated power.

I wouldn't rule out 8 inch floppy, that might be the best bootable OS option.

I think you can jump to those last eight words right now. Unless she's a really super-duper keeper.

--
Tim Wescott 
Control systems, embedded software and circuit design 
I'm looking for work!  See my website if you're interested 
http://www.wescottdesign.com

For the 8" floppy drive, i highly recommend the DT-8; extremely reliable and rugged. It will tolerate and read those horrible sector-by-sector indexed floppies. Any other drive will tear itself up.

FYI, I have an XT-IDE adapter, which works just fine -- can boot off a CF card on my XT compatible. (Woohoo, 128MB super-fast removable hard disk!)

Such a thing exists for S100, e.g.

Tim

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Seven Transistor Labs, LLC 
Electrical Engineering Consultation and Contract Design 
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Once you start doing new hardware to emulate older things you are on a slippery slope. Of course you can do the emulation of the entire system on something like a Raspberry Pi, including showing a picture of the original hardware and leds, and still outperform it by some orders of magnitude.

Then you can still run the original software.

I have a cabinet with 3 8" floppies, another one with 2 5" floppies, a third one with a 5" 5MB harddisk + controller and a Z-80 system box still sitting in my basement. Has not been powered up for at least

15 years, probably will have some issues.

Boards like this come up from time to time on the 'bay:

It's pretty full-featured from near the end of the S-100 era, I guess.

4Mhz Z80, 64k ram, 2x serial port and 2x parallel port channels, double-density floppy disk controller, 64k of RAM onboard with support for up to 16MB.

All that on a single card is certainly near the end of the era. I remember I had a catalog from one of the S-100 companies but it had CPU/RAM cards, video cards, floppy controller cards etc all separate. It was way above my budget for a complete system.

My system originally was a TRS-80 model 1 that I removed from the keyboard case and built into a 5U 19" case with some homebrew expander cards and a power supply above it:

- floppy disk controller for 5" and 8" single/double density

- SASI interface for hard disk

- graphics controller

I extended the onboard RAM to 64K using 64kx1 chips instead of the original 4k or 16k, and added bankswitching to make the full

64K visible when running CP/M. When running TRS-80 software it only had 48K RAM + BASIC in ROM.

On Saturday, April 22, 2017 at 5:00:06 AM UTC-7, bitrex wrote: ...z2f>

I think that's an 80186, not a Z80. The Z80 didn't come in an LCC package (middle of the board in a socket). I used the 80186 on some boards in 83-88.

kevin