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| Unexpected ewaste find: MicroQue PDS4/Top Hat. Quad LC PDS Adapter! |
Posted by: al kossow on 2021-09-03 04:55:53
Running a bunch of PDS cards with the stock power supply would be challenging. |
Posted by: maceffects on 2021-09-03 05:22:36
I kind of what to clone this and I don't know why... |
Posted by: Compgeke on 2021-09-03 08:10:56
Am I right in thinking you ended up with Chocky's RiscPC? If so, that's heading towards being some kind of historic artefact, though possibly under the category of "great dedication to bashing one's head against walls"—the RISC OS Firefox port looked like a horrible job.
Not just his Risc PC, I also ended up with his Iyonix. The RPC itself is actually really nice though, it came with a Kinetic upgrade and an eesox graphic equalizer in the top slice. Not sure where the equalizer came from no one else has seen them before. |
Posted by: olePigeon on 2021-09-03 10:39:56
I kind of what to clone this and I don't know why... Just the adapter? Or the whole thing? |
Posted by: maceffects on 2021-09-03 13:56:58
You know me, I want to do it all 😅 |
Posted by: olePigeon on 2021-09-05 17:17:57
@maceffects I can't remember, are you in the Bay Area? If so, you're welcome to borrow mine. |
Posted by: maceffects on 2021-09-05 20:00:16
@olePigeon I wish I was, I’m here in the Midwest. Appreciate the offer though! To be fair, I probably don’t need more projects. It’s like some kind of addition. |
Posted by: max1zzz on 2021-09-09 16:28:22
@maceffects Well if you do ever decide you need another project I would 100% buy one. I need more reproduction parts to go with my reproduction boards 🙂 |
Posted by: Melkhior on 2024-01-29 07:51:27
Um... we're sure it's an LC card? As in the 020 that got half it's bus width stolen??? It's only the RAM (both onboard & SIMMs) that is half-width at 16 bits in the LC. The ROM is 32-bits wide, and the PDS has access to all 32-bits of data as well. It doesn't have access to all address bits though, and that's an issue.
The missing address bits (and signals for the synchronous cycles of the '030) are on the extension part of the slot in the LCIII and later.
Has anyone eventually tried to reverse engineer this? It seems a fairly straightforward design, with just U1 being masked by a sticker so could be difficult. The Toshiba chips are bus switches so easy to understand. I do wonder how this is supposed to work given the limited addressing available on the LC. |
Posted by: VMSZealot on 2024-01-29 09:04:16
A clone of this card would be great - and especially if it could relocate the cards in the standard case. After all, there's lots of dead space to accommodate a card where the hard drive was intended to go - and SCSI to SD adaptors don't take up a lot of space. So that would make a configuration with Apple II card at the back (for those of us who still have a Y cable!) and ethernet at the front, with the ethernet cable squeezing out of - well - squeezing out of somewhere. The case is hardly watertight! |
Posted by: BobDaAggie on 2025-08-22 12:24:25
Was there any movement on a clone of this card? |
Posted by: olePigeon on 2025-08-22 14:00:44
I still have the card somewhere, but no one ever asked me for it to be cloned. |
Posted by: BobDaAggie on 2025-08-23 07:16:29
Would you be interested in selling or training it? |
Posted by: olePigeon on 2025-08-26 08:44:33
I would be happy to lend it out to be cloned, but I'd want it back. I'm holding out hopes that I might be able to complete my Power Workstation at some point. |
Posted by: BobDaAggie on 2025-08-26 09:55:42
That is what I would like as well. I am just learning about circuit board diagrams so I am not the person create the new board. I wonder if we could get someone that has experience to clone it. |
Posted by: BobDaAggie on 2025-08-29 13:21:58
Would you mind taking some very high resolution photos of the card and sharing them? |
Posted by: zigzagjoe on 2025-08-29 14:16:05
This is probably just selectively enabling /AS and /DS to individual slots based on the status of a physical/logical switch to enable/disable.
I would be curious what U1 is doing - perhaps allows for installation of an accelerator in a certain one of the slots - but I don't expect anything terribly exotic. Termination resistors to help with signal integrity, pulls, buffer caps. It's not going to allow running multiple cards at the same time, just a way to switch between them. But as long as cards are well behaved, if you don't show a disabled card the address and data strobes disabled cards could happily co-exist on the same bus. Just don't change the status of the switch without the system being in reset (or powered off). |
Posted by: BobDaAggie on 2025-08-29 14:27:41
would that be a card that you would be interested in reproducing? |
Posted by: zigzagjoe on 2025-08-29 20:34:41
would that be a card that you would be interested in reproducing? Unfortunately no.... I have been struggling and failing to muster motivation to work on the projects I've already got in the air, so I'm definitely not taking on anything new. |
Posted by: BobDaAggie on 2025-08-29 20:50:00
Makes sense. How did you get into cloning cards? What tools and lessons could I get into to possibly start. I have some ideas cards that I would like to try my hand at reproducing |
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