1 Feb
1998
1 Feb
'98
9:38 a.m.
At 09:44 AM 2/1/98 -0800, you wrote:
> I have several leads on people with S-100 boards
so if you are looking for
> something specific, let me know. Can't promise anything except that I will
> check around. I would think that most, if not all, S-100 stuff would work
> in the Altair.
It depends. Most later good-quality boards follow the
IEEE-696
standard, which requires modifications to the front panel circuitry
of a Altair or IMSAI.
And make sure that they are still 8-bit boards! Some of the later
Godbout/Ithica Audio, etc. stuff went to 16 bit which will freak out an
Altair/IMSAI front panel something awful!
And the Altair backplane is so poorly designed that
it's nearly impossible
to run a CPU above 2 MHz in it
Well... I'll take minor exception to this statement. I ran (and still do)
the Cromemco (and other) Z-80 boards at 4mHz with little difficulty, and
saw others get tweaked as high as 10mHz!
Some improvement is had by installing Compupro/Godbout
terminators at the
far end.
No dispute here... Termination is good! I tended to add it to most of my
machines in later days.
-jim
---
jimw(a)agora.rdrop.com
The Computer Garage - http://www.rdrop.com/~jimw
Computer Garage Fax - (503) 646-0174