VOGONS


First post, by Errius

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Hi, all. Does anyone know anything about the attached card?

It appears to provide RAM expansion, RTC, and serial port. Board carries no markings apart from JAPAN. It has a green Varta battery permanently soldered. Jumper and dip switch settings are unknown. There are unknown purpose 26-pin (J2) and 16-pin (J3) headers. It has 54 sockets (6 x 8+1 parity) for 4164-class 64 Kibit DIP-16 DRAM memory modules. i.e. 384 KiB RAM. The memory chips are all Samsung KM4164A-15 (150 ns).

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Last edited by Errius on 2018-08-26, 15:30. Edited 1 time in total.

Is this too much voodoo?

Reply 1 of 5, by gbeirn

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J2 is the parallel port, J3 the game port.

The jumpers likely select IRQ, etc for the ports.

The dip switched likely how much RAM is on card and at what address to put it. Sadly a no name card and trial and error would be the only way to figure it out.

Reply 2 of 5, by Errius

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Found it, thank you -- that the 16-pin connector was a game port was the key piece of information.

http://arvutimuuseum.ee/th99/i/U-Z/54640.htm

The original card was apparently Diamond Flower MF-100. The model was apparently also made by Donatec.

Is this too much voodoo?

Reply 3 of 5, by stamasd

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Oh I have one of these. It came complete with the manual which I've scanned, and it's been uploaded to http://www.minuszerodegrees.net/manuals.htm (see under "DFI")
There's also on that page an image of the disk that originally came with the card.
The board provides up to 384k RAM which can be used to backfill conventional memory on machines that came with less than 640k. It cannot be configured as extended or expanded memory. If you already have 640k the only useful thing you can do with the memory on this card is a ramdisk.

Last edited by stamasd on 2018-08-27, 01:37. Edited 4 times in total.

I/O, I/O,
It's off to disk I go,
With a bit and a byte
And a read and a write,
I/O, I/O

Reply 5 of 5, by stamasd

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Nope, the only XT-class computer I have already has 640k and I really don't have any use for a tiny ramdisk. Interestingly enough the motherboard I used for that XT and the MF-100 came from the same auction (together with a CGA card) so I suspect they may have come originally from the same machine. The previous owner was probably using it for the I/O ports - but I decided I'm better off with a later multi-I/O card (with HD-FDD and IDE controllers too). So this card is now unused in a box.

I/O, I/O,
It's off to disk I go,
With a bit and a byte
And a read and a write,
I/O, I/O