Rob NorrisMade it back from #vcfsw with three S-100 video cards (from Vector Graphics, Solid State Music, and Processor Technology) and a 1-bit Soviet core memory module. It will be fun to see if I can get any of them going. 1/n
Ok, first up is the Solid State Music VB1. The video signal was waaaay too slow, which led me to a dead counter IC which I replaced, so now at least it's syncing and showing junk. Fiddling with the DIP switches I did see some characters for a second, but then it went back to lines. So, more digging. Switches are likely corroded and the RAM is almost certainly somewhat dead. But still, good progress tonight. 2/n
In any case I did a bunch of little repairs and now I'm seeing the kind of random junk I was expecting. A few more sanity checks and then I'll test it out on the Altair. 4/n
Minor side quest, I finally installed this card I built last year. It lets me map in RAM, ROM, or nothing for each 1k block in the upper half of the address space, so now I can make a hole for the framebuffer. 5/n
And it works! BASIC is way too slow to do anything interesting but it should be nice and fast in assembler. 6/n
Next up is a relaxing soak for the Vector Graphics HRG, which was splattered with what I choose to believe was mud. There is almost no information available online so it may be a challenge to get it working. On the off chance anyone in #retrocomputing land has any info, please contact me. 7/n
Seven ICs on the HRG test bad, as do all the electrolytics and one of the transistors. There are 64 RAM chips on the other board that I need to test, but first I need to build a tester. This is how you run out of stack space. 8/n
