Replacement of some old prom by a GAL, Application to a Thaler MPS-65 board

Posted on 26/03/2021 by hanso

Didier form aida.org was approached by his friend Erik about a malfunctioning MPS-65.

By studying the material on this page and doing measurements on the board it was decided the PROM on the board was malfunctioning.

So Didier designed a GAL replacement for the PROM and the board came back to life!

Here the story how the design looks like.

Intel SDK-85 SBC

Posted on 18/03/2021 by hanso

A new SBC, made by Intel, the SDK-85. Functional, good looking.

Convert to Papertape V2.2

Posted on 07/03/2021 by hanso

On the Utilities page I have two programs to convert to MOS Technology papertape format: KIMpaper, a command line utility, and ConvertHexFormat, a GUI app.

All in Freepascal/Lazarus source format, and tested on Linux (Raspberry PI OS) and Windows 10 64 bit. So the programs will run everywhere Lazarus is available (MS DOS, WIndows, Linux Mac OS).

KIMPAPER is written at the time the Micro-KIM appeared. CLI utility. Supports Binary to/from Papertape. Still runs fine on all platforms supported by Freepascal (Windows, MS DOS, Linux etc) after a recompilation, source available.

ConvertHexFormat is a more recent GUI utilitilty with many more 8 bit hex formats as input and output.

There were some bugs of course in older versions. V2 added the ability for multipart hex formats, records having a non-consecutive load address. That seems to wok fine since V2.1
In 2.2 a bug in MOS Papertape format for bigger files is fixed, the end-of-file record (record type 00, total line count) had a bug in the checksum calculation. KIMPAPER is and was correct in the calculation.
But in ConvertHexFormat it was wrong (as it still is in the well known srec utility in the Unix world!).

PC utilities updated

Posted on 01/03/2021 by hanso

The PC utilities page has seen an update of th4 Conversion hex formats utility.

Programs to manipulate the binary and hex formatted files of interest for SBC owners. Intel hex, MOS papertape, Motorola S-record, binary, hex conversion fort eh 8 bit world.
Runs on Windows, Linux, Mac due to Lazarus and Freepascal. Source included.