z80

His Crazy maze game was by far the best arcade game written for the S80, graphics was reasonable, but the keyboard etc responses in the game were first class, and it wasnt a pushover to play either. I would actually be building the machine to play the one game...silly as it seems.

Am a bit slow in getting back to this thread...( a bit like the computer mentioned here...LOL) Does anyone have a main board or broken super 80 that i could use as a master to have it remade? I believe Cherry can still supply the keyboard bits. Have found the guy George who wrote the Crazy maze game, he still has a copy...somewhere...

You were absolutely correct. He is not in the least bit interested whatsoever. there is no danger of copyright with this design, it's all forgotten.

I am a current advertiser with Silicon Chip magazine in australia. They were formerly known as Electronics Australia I have emailed the editor Leo Simpson, who was involved with the Super-80 initiially as a junior. Have sent him everything and requested that the magazine investigate the idea of a redesign etc of the product as it seems to have been anbandoned by the original copyright owners. I will forward the results of my interaction with him here. cheers john

If the 82s123 is located near the CRT controller, then about 20 years ago I actually had to program one up to hand build my first microbee from a schematic diagram. It is a fusible link prom that gets programmed one bit at a time. This is the data:- 65 92 55 91 96 92 95 91 d5 d1 d5 d1 d5 d1 d5 d1 d5 d1 d5 d1 d5 d1 d5 d1 d5 d1 d5 d1 d5 d1 d5 d1 It is a critical component and is essentially used as a complex gate array. hope that helps.

as for the tape I will feed it into a sound card and make an wav file out of it....

I wish i still had it, but alas I have no idea where it got to...lost in a move somewhere. All I need is some time....but got the bios rom now so will have a go at it soon. They are sooo easy to get going if they are broken..as longa s you have a good scope. If someone has a board I have a pro desoldering machine to remove everything and copy the artwork. then that would add a new dimension to the "genuineness"

Pheww...had a Lo-o-o-o-o-ng look in my shed last month and found my Super-80 stuff. Got the original Technical construction manual, circuit diagram....It's Electronics Australia October 1981. I also have the original documentation for the Dick Smith character generator...with circuit diagram. Also atech bulletin to fix random chars on screen (u76 mod). Would you believe it, an original Cassette still in its case of the debuger/disassembler by DS? LOL A good find is a heap of Super-80 Users group newsletters from the heathmont club. I used to live across the road, one night as I recall a manager of DSE came along and got an absolute caneing by the group for lack of support....those were the days. Will scan all the documents and commit to CD, and make available for all. If anyone has a completely stuffed S80, I have the professional equipment to clean it up and copy the PCB, in any event if not, a mate can plug the circuit diagram into Protel and generate anew pcb. 50 pieces ex China would be cheap as chips.

found all my stuff ...christ its 25 years old !!! I have my original Dick Smith Technical manual Issue 1 rev B. Also my issues from Melbourne Super 80 users group newsletters. Is someone able to supply me with the rom code? Am happy to build a clone in my spare time...LOL I would make a 5v only version with static ram (one chip LOL) Looking over my notes from the users group adding a 0.22uf greencap on pins 2 and 12 of U15 improves the readability of the default font. Also have full technical manuals for Microbee and Trs80 MK2....I built both in wirewrap and still have them. Oh and found the schemaqtic for a VIC20.....jeez that's old. (like me) can scan and pdf all this stuff if you guys are really keen...

I also think from memory you can execute a monitor command that selects the block of memory to use as the video memory, and I seem to recall it was useful for seeing memory activity in real time. That was actually a very,very useful diagnostic tool in some situations.

thanks for the warm welcome. I cannot tell a lie, I remember alot about this particular machine. The most notable thing was the duty cycle between the video memory scanning and processing duty cycle. It was novel to say the least From memory the cassette save/load were done in the "dark as well" ? Any ways I willl see if I can dig up any stuff that I still have...I am abit of a hoarder of eproms and the such. Of particular interest to me was a game called "crazy maze". have you guys got it? It is worth wire wrapping a machine just to play it LOL

It is interesting to see this machine sparking some interest. I remember building one of these along long long time ago. A number of us were mainframe engineers and we also built a microbee, trs80 etc etc. We wirewrapped all of them. I still have the microbee complete with floppy controller. The original super80 had quite an excellent installation troubleshooting guide that you guys could follow. It tells you exactly what signals should be where and what chip is likely to be at fault. The most common issue was the cheap sockets budled with the units, they only contacted the pins on one side, hence very unreliable. We had a users group in Melbourne to which I attended on ocassions. Do you guys have software for this machine?