CreatiVEmu Forum

Hi,

Thanks to Dieter König (http://www.classic-consoles-center.at), who lent me his Prototype (or at least very small production run) i was able to examine it and take pictures of this gem. (Madrigal will add bigger and pictures to the site soon).

The 16K Memory Expansion Module uses the same case and the same PCB as the Parallel I/O Module and they simply added an internal cartridge-slot and used the same Memory cartridge as in the Salora Manager 16K Expansion!

As Barry Klein in his Wizzdom Newsletter #3 stated, only 12K are addressed and useable. I do not know how the 16K and the I/O work together, because they share one 2K Memory block (i think the user has to take care not to "double use" the I/O module adresses...

One strange Thing is the 2K block from F000-F7FF... on both expansions (16K and I/O) this Memory area is left unused... so i ask myself Why?????
Has anyone an idea? here are my guesses: maybe used to blend in future Diskdrive I/O? or maybe reserved for BIOS updates? I have no clue...

here are the Pictures ;0)

More pics...
and a rudimentary schematic i gobbled together... ;0)
TOM:0)

You have done a wonderful job with this unit, Tom!

Thanks so much for sharing the pics, information and scheme.

On a side note: the production must have been somehow expensive, because the SMD ram modules were quite expensive back in 1984.

PS: did you notice... the sticker on the bottom reads "1984", this must have been the very last interface ever released for CV.

[quote="MADrigal"]
On a side note: the production must have been somehow expensive, because the SMD ram modules were quite expensive back in 1984.
quote]

And two of them are not even used!!!!

TOM:0)

Has anyone tried to upgrade the internal ram? Looks like it can address up to 4k easily enough.

Changed the 1k ram to 4K ram, seems to work okay, just need to write a poke/peek program to check

Hi kevgal, nice mod!
I would love to see a few pics and a shematic, which chips do you use (4116?) and so on...

Now all you need is some software that can use the additional 3K ... :0)

Greetings, TOM:0)

I used a couple of 6268 4 bit 4K chips. Changed the 2114s to sockets so they could be replaced and ran 3 wires from pins 1,19 and 20 to A10, A11 and VCC.
Not sure what it can be used for, maybe can get more basic program? I seem to remember it had a 100 line limit?
What was the 16k expansion pack used for?

the basic listings has no line limit, but a RAM limit. approx 9k (every byte, including the line number, counts as 1 byte).

the basic listings are stored in the video RAM. the CPU RAM has very limited use and despite peeking/poking, there is not much you can do with the basic interpreter

but maybe the extra 3k of CPU RAM can turn out to be useful for ROM-based games. maybe it could be a good way to store temporary routines or uncompressed data/vectors, etc.

you have done a fantstic work. now let the developers speak

ps would you mind posting a few photos of the hardware mod?