S100

General discussions related to the Altair 8800 Clone

S100

Postby Mianderson » June 11th, 2018, 11:08 pm

How hard would it be to add an Altair(S100) bus to an Altair 8800 clone?
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Re: S100

Postby toml_12953 » June 12th, 2018, 10:45 am

Pretty hard. You'd be better off buying an old S-100 bus computer.
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Re: S100

Postby AltairClone » June 12th, 2018, 11:53 am

Unfortunately, nothing about the Altair Clone electronics could be used to build an S-100 system. However, with the recent release of a reproduction Altair motherboard and Altair CPU board, combined with the availability of M. Eberhards enhanced 88-2SIO board and my enhanced Altair floppy controller, we're almost to the point where a "new" Altair 8800 computer could be built.

I'm a long way into the design of a replacement Altair front panel board that can mount in the Altair Clone's cabinet (the original Altair front panel board doesn't fit well into the Clone cabinet). Also, rather than having to cut, strip, and hand-solder 100 wires, this front panel board will connect with a ribbon cable to an interface board in the S-100 bus much like is done in the Altair 8800b.

With these boards, plus the Altair Clone cabinet and a couple of switching power supplies, you have a new Altair 8800 computer. Of course, this is blasphemy to some hobbyists, but it may appeal to other hobbyists to have an Altair up and running with an S-100 bus and boards. Of course, vintage boards (CPU, RAM, serial I/O, disk controller, motherboard, etc.) could be used as well.

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Re: S100

Postby TomXP411 » June 12th, 2018, 5:10 pm

I'm into that. I'd love to see a legit S100 system, especially if it had the option to connect modern hardware, such as SATA or USB storage media.

One of the best new devices for the Commodore 64 (the other vintage system I'm enjoying) is the SD2IEC, a "floppy drive" that uses SD cards. Using something akin to that to mount floppy and hard drive images would be a great way to extend the utility of vintage hardware without needing to source things like old hard drives, floppy drives, and media that no longer is in production.
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Re: S100

Postby Synoptic » June 13th, 2018, 9:07 am

AltairClone wrote:However, with the recent release of a reproduction Altair motherboard and Altair CPU board, combined with the availability of M. Eberhards enhanced 88-2SIO board and my enhanced Altair floppy controller, we're almost to the point where a "new" Altair 8800 computer could be built.


Where can I find more information about these ?
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Re: S100

Postby AltairClone » June 13th, 2018, 1:05 pm

Synoptic wrote:Where can I find more information about these ?


Martin's enhanced 2SIO and my enhanced Altair floppy controller can be found at http://deramp.com/for_sale.html

Here is information about Altair reproduction boards from Gary Kaufman https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/alt ... sages/5604

And some more from a gentleman in the UK https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/alt ... opics/5553

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