I Have Some 8088's

[duffy]

Amazing. Ever look at Nolan Bushnel's hand-drawn schematics for "Computer Space"? Sprinkling of diodes for the ship and saucer image ROMs.

 

[Video Warrior]

Hmm. I don't know that I ever did see the schems for "Computer Space". I remember the cabinet though. Still one of the cooler vid cabinets ever.

Mister P. (Stormy's West) had a logic set for Computer Space. Hacked it into some other B & W horizontal game cabinet. "Space Race", maybe. Pretty much the same controls and game action as Asteroids, but raster scan. And dot outline ships and stuff. I do remember diodes *everywhere* on one of the boards for it.

 

[Video Warrior]

And grandfather would be the Intel 4004 chip set. Had a 4004 chip set at one time but never did anything with them.

I had the chip set too. Built into this:
**broken link removed**

I miss that game. Lots of fun.

 

[duffy]

I don't remember the Gorf optical joystick... was it proportional or switched? Did it have black plastic flat sliding vanes and interrupter optos?

Remember that one game that had the sliding-core inductors in the proportional joystick? Was it Tron?

 

[mramos1]

I am with Nigel, should have left them behind. All the support chips you will need to use them, etc. Ebay them and see what you can get.

Unless you have a lot of old IBM PC based controllers to fix I can not see anyone wanting to design around them. Just my thought.

Now how the 8080 and Z80 got in here (grant it worth about the same as they are microprocessors from even earlier and a bit of history), but I thought the guy was selling 8088 chips?

 

[Video Warrior]

There are other things around that run 8088 besides IBM PC. Thousands of Bendix and Dynapath® CNC cages, f'rinstance. People that have them won't necessarily pony up $25K (or more) for a bright shiny new control, but they *will* pay $3K to have their Processor cards (running the 8088) fixed and sent back to them with a warranty on the repair. Especially if a downed control means they can't make parts to ship which means they can't invoice for said parts which means they can't pay bills.

Anyway, I am making arrangements with ParkingLotLust to take the 8088s off his hands. I'll even take 'em untested. If I get 50% yield I'm ahead on that one.

The 8080 and Z80 chatter? I guess there might be this new syndrome flying around boards lately. Let's call it "drift".

duffy, Gorf was indeed opto interrupters with the black plastic sliders. Eight-way. That sliding inductor thing.. shoot.. I'm trying to remember. I'm sure it was also Midway. Not Tron, that was conventional 8-way blade switches. And a spinner. Maybe Two Tigers?? Dang it. Now I hafta go research *that*...

 

[BeeBop]

There are other things around that run 8088 besides IBM PC. Thousands of Bendix and Dynapath® CNC cages, f'rinstance. People that have them won't necessarily pony up $25K (or more) for a bright shiny new control, but they *will* pay $3K to have their Processor cards (running the 8088) fixed and sent back to them with a warranty on the repair. Especially if a downed control means they can't make parts to ship which means they can't invoice for said parts which means they can't pay bills.

Warrior, you don't by chance have a shop in Langley BC, do you?

 

[mramos1]

Like said, unless for repair, can not see a big market for them. Sure his yield will be better that 50% unless they sign them in and out to a class.

And the IBM based hardware/bios is probably in all those machine.

 

[Video Warrior]

BeeBop: Nope. SE Wisconsin. And, mramos1, nope. These are CNC controls (is that redundant?). Embedded micros. The OS was written by Dynapath. The hardware resemblance to anything IBM put in a PC ends at the bus transceivers and address buffers.

 

[kchriste]

It doesn't say a word about production. Z80 is 8080's father because the idea predates 8080.
The Abacus is used because it predates all.
I hate to break it to you, but there is no little man in any of these devices.
It's a piece about ideas.

It's a cute story, but the factual errors distract me from fully enjoying it:

8080 called them his memory cells and pointed out that on one wall was a group of boxes arranged in 16 rows with 16 boxes in each row. These he referred to as his "Registers." He had them labeled in order to keep track of them. I won't bore you with labels, but others have seen them and can tell you what they are called if you are interested. Two of the walls contained many, many boxes. He said that there were 640,000 boxes (memory cells) altogether.

The 8080 only had seven 8-bit registers, (A, B, C, D, E, H, and L). The 8080 could only directly address 64K of memory. You are confusing him with his son, the 8088, here. The 8008 would have been the grandfather in the family. The Z80 could be considered the ******* son who turns up later to steal all the customers away from the older 8080.

 

[Video Warrior]

Oh. The Z80 is the "Heath" of the 8-bit Barkley clan? I get it. It then went on to run the various pieces in Lee Major's bionic arm? Timeline doesn't seem right...