Altair 8800C

Discuss construction, troubleshooting, and operation of the Altair 8800c computer

Altair 8800C

Postby toml_12953 » November 8th, 2018, 9:52 pm

Any plans to sell kits of these? It might take a while to track down all the separate parts on our own.

Is there a modern version of the cassette boards? Maybe interfacing your small cassette module from the Clone? The original two board set was very hard to keep in adjustment and required recalibration every time I added or removed any boards from the system not to mention being almost impossible to find in any condition working or not.
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Re: Altair 8800C

Postby AltairClone » November 9th, 2018, 11:28 am

I don't plan to make a kit of the Altair 8800c. Based on input, each person's ideal system is going to be a bit different, so a single version of the kit wouldn't work well. I'll update the deramp.com website soon with information about where to buy the boards shown in the video.

The 8800 CPU replica is a bare board, I plan on selling the front panel board set as bare boards, the FDC+ and 88-2SIOJP are available assembled. New mother boards will typically be bare boards.

As I was finishing this computer, I realized the one hole in the "new Altair 8800" concept is the cassette interface. The easiest solution is the little Altair Clone cassette interface connected to a vintage serial board that can be strapped to look like the 88-SIO board (e.g., the SSM IO-4 board), or an actual 88-SIO board, of course - but those are quite rare.

If a number of people build these, I may create a full board that duplicates the Altair 88-ACR board set.

Mike
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Re: Altair 8800C

Postby toml_12953 » November 11th, 2018, 12:15 am

AltairClone wrote:
If a number of people build these, I may create a full board that duplicates the Altair 88-ACR board set.

Mike


How about an 88-VI RTC Vector Interrupt Real-Time Clock board? My goal is to run Timesharing BASIC and I'd need that functionality.
I have a saved search on eBay but these are rare.
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Re: Altair 8800C

Postby AltairClone » November 11th, 2018, 9:01 am

This guy in the UK is making close reproductions of a number of Altair cards. He’s done the VI/RTC.

http://jmprecision.co.uk/shopping/start.php?browse=1

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Re: Altair 8800C

Postby alank2 » November 11th, 2018, 6:36 pm

Hi Mike,

Do you plan on having a case + front panel board set ?

Thanks,

Alan
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Re: Altair 8800C

Postby toml_12953 » November 11th, 2018, 10:02 pm

AltairClone wrote:This guy in the UK is making close reproductions of a number of Altair cards. He’s done the VI/RTC.

http://jmprecision.co.uk/shopping/start.php?browse=1

Mike


That's great! Thanks!
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Re: Altair 8800C

Postby AltairClone » November 11th, 2018, 10:12 pm

alank2 wrote:Do you plan on having a case + front panel board set ?


Keep on top of updates at http://deramp.com/altair_8800c.html

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Re: Altair 8800C

Postby toml_12953 » November 14th, 2018, 12:16 pm

AltairClone wrote:This guy in the UK is making close reproductions of a number of Altair cards. He’s done the VI/RTC.

http://jmprecision.co.uk/shopping/start.php?browse=1

Mike


The 88-VI manual says there are three inductance coils are these the same as ferrite beads? It doesn't say what values they are or anything about them. Do you know what I should use? As you can tell, I'm not too familiar with electronics so this is confusing to me.
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Re: Altair 8800C

Postby AltairClone » November 14th, 2018, 12:54 pm

toml_12953 wrote:The 88-VI manual says there are three inductance coils are these the same as ferrite beads? It doesn't say what values they are or anything about them. Do you know what I should use? As you can tell, I'm not too familiar with electronics so this is confusing to me.


These aren't inductance coils, they're simply ferrite beads as you surmised. You can just put a wire across the holes and skip the ferrite bead.

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Re: Altair 8800C

Postby toml_12953 » December 19th, 2018, 7:06 am

On the Altair 8800c Front Panel board, what's the difference between switch S1 and S10-S25 other than the color (silver vs gold) Does S1 have a different voltage or current rating?
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