SimmSticks - Why?

How many times are you going to install memory in a system? ANd no, I haven't.

In a fit of lucidity, Richard Henry mumbled:

Sir, the clue-train is approaching the crossing and blowing its horn. That is, I think he was referring to "simmsticks" as in

I don't use them myself. Real Men still wirewrap below 1GHz.

SimmSticks aren't (necessarily) memory. See

Never used them, myself. Regards,

-=Dave

ROFL... Now that I can agree with. Still one of the fastest prototyping methods, _if_ you have a power wrapper. Mine dates back to 1979 and still gets regular use...

Chris

I have heard of these. I didn't think anyone actually used them.

we have had them on the market for about 7 years.

socket endurance?

you can do this with these boards too, you don't have to use the sockets at all. There is a row of holes behind the edge connector see:

yes, cable clamps or whatever, we do this too.

SimmStick uses these buses also, as well as several third party products that have USB on a SimmStick.

Hundreds of thousands of these boards have now been sold. Editorial staff at N&V, and Circuit Cellar have also used them. First commercially available proto boards for the AVR family was a SimmStick.

no, I

they work well. easy to assemble and use.

Alex

Nah. Power wrappers are for wusses.

I tend to think of wirewrapping as knitting for nerds. I love it. ;)

I shall wirewrap a sweater one day...

Steve

I've tried some power wrappers, I still prefer a hand tool.

But it _is_ knitting for nerds. I'm about to knit an 8 MHz V20 (NEC

Strange perhaps, but I have friends who knit chainmail while watching TV.

I still love the old slit-n-wrap. Alas, it got a bad reputation from people who didn't follow the instructions. If you calibrate the tension at the start of the spool and halfway through, you never get a bad wrap.

I think that one of the main reasons is that an engineer who has tried several dontronics products and has found that they are all well-documented, well-supported and a good fit for most projects with have a tendency to buy the next new dontronics product.

BTW, here is another tiny computer that I like a lot:

Don't forget the high resistance R2R ladder DAC on buffered/latched address and data lines, feeding the XY of your scope and a stereo audio amplifier. A retro system without that wouldn't do at all!

There are limits. After all, I'm not adding data/address toggle switches. It has to fit a 8"x6"x2.5" Pactec case (except for the hard drive) and a small card (except for the RAM card). Besides, the QIX arcade board already has stereo DACs (and an RS232 port). :^P

It really is turning out to be a retro project. My old EPROM programmer software uses timing loops for an XT, so I'll have to take out the loops. Sourcer (disassembler) doesn't want to run in Windows even in DOS mode, so I'll have to configure a 486 as a MSDOS box. You see, this is really just a plot to justify all the junk I keep in the basement.

This started out as a hobby project to get away from it all. As Rocky tells Bullwinkle, "that trick never works!"