The Trump Card: Zilog Z8000 Coprocessor for the IBM PC by Sweet Micro Systems 1984 Vintage Computer
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- Опубліковано 16 гру 2022
- I've been on a quest for a while to resurrect the Trump Card. This was based on a set of articles published in BYTE Magazine back in 1984 by Steve Ciarcia. The card is designed to be placed in an IBM PC 5150 or similar clone, and adds a 16-bit Zilog Z8000 processor with 512KB of RAM. It's a truly unique product for its time, but what makes it unique is the software, which I don't have and might be lost to the world, so I'm calling out for help to anyone who might have the software for this unique expansion card. Please, help me return this Z8000 coprocessor back to service! For more vintage and retro computer projects, see www.smbaker.com/
- Наука та технологія
Make Zilog Great Again. :D
Update (1/3/2023). I have been in contact with Steve Ciarcia who provided me some of the historical background on the Trump Card. Steve does not know if he still had a copy of the software or not, but the majority of his Circuit Cellar materials have been donated to the Computer Museum of America in Georgia. If Steve had a copy of the disks, then that's where the disks would have ended up. It will likely be some time before the museum has time to unpack and inventory the materials. Steve recalls sending the Trump Card software to at least a hundred BYTE Magazine readers who built the cards themselves. The card, as we know, was also commercialized by Sweet Micro who sold an undisclosed number of completed cards with software. So there are still a few leads to follow in the search for the software.
I asked Steve Ciarcia if he has the old software (I think he had a few emails about this). He told me he recently (this year) donated all of his Circuit Cellar stuff to the Computer Museum of America. So, everything he had has been packed up and moved. I'll email the museum but I would think the old software is in a box of floppies somewhere and unavailable for a while. Good luck with your vintage project!
This is so much more useful and interesting than that other guys cards even without the software to use it.
Thank you for your ethos of always uploading every info, article, schematic, document and software, so that it is preserved for the future.
At 8:40 the loose wire was still connected, so you can see where it went. It appears to go to pin 8 of IC30 (54F32 aka 74LS32, an OR gate).
What an astonishing expansion card! I had never heard of using a Z8000 as a co-processor for anything, and, while it seems like a product that was doomed to obscurity by price if nothing else, I'm very intrigued. Once again, I'm reminded that there were a lot of niche products made for computers (about the time that I was just a child) that I've never even heard of, let alone seen. I hope you do get a copy of all the software for this card and make a video (or videos!) putting it through its paces. 🙂
I also have to chuckle at the accidental name association -- decades later -- with a certain famous person, and the accidental consequence that I couldn't help but picture that person trying to sell this alongside steaks and vodka, presumably through the Sharper Image. ;-)
Please show any updates on this card that you have in the future, whatever they are!
This is amazing, terrific. Probably the best coprocessor card for PC that ever was or will be.
I have the impression that this software is still around in other forms. Nobody is writing a completely new CP/M for a computer, they always take a big chunk that is already there, and then adapt only a few little things. The compilers you mentioned, if they are working within CP/M then it must be simple to find them.
Nice wig, there once was a president in America called Trump, he had a wig like that.
So the wiring on the RAM does suggest that those are 41256 chips in place of 4164's, with pin 1 being wired to the added multiplexed address line (which is NC on the 4164). The addressing for the extra line is a bit complex since it needs to be multiplexed. Also, the original addressing on the card was a bit odd, with segment bit 3 being partially wired but unused, and segment bit 4 being used to select between RAM and ROM. For the expansion, segment bit 5 is wired from the Z8001, but you'll want to check the other segment bits and see if they changed the RAM/ROM addressing, as it could affect compatibility.
Interesting that the letter to the customer in the first page of the manual suggests that it doesn't come with the memory, and the user needs to purchase this separately. The article you showed earlier had an advertisement with a 256K RAM card for $299, so loading this up with 512K memory could cost you a lot more than that! Especially once you take into account inflation since 1984. I believe the DRAM war was in full swing at that time, so it would've still been possible to buy relatively cheap Japanese memory chips. If you could find a supplier that would sell it to you. Just a coulpe of years later, the US would impose trade restrictions which would force Japanese DRAM makers to apply export quotas to the US, and artificially increase their prices to make the US DRAM makers more competitive.
There was also a SCSI/RAM expansion for the Amiga 500 made by Interactive Video Systems that was called the trump card.
Ooh! Ooh! Scan and publish the manuals please! :-)
Hmmm .. I am 110% sure that some time this year I have see a YT video of someone running the software on a Z8000 8bit ISA PC card, but I cant remember what channel it was, but I would guess it to be either --Usagi Electric-- or --a mail call video of Adrians Digital Basement-- . --It might even have been the renamed AkBKukU channel .. Tech Tangents-- EDIT: I remember them referring to it as _a strange Accelerator card for IBM PC_ , but they did show the TBASIC compiler and interpreter working, and the CPM/80 emulator, plus the card had more RAM than the 5150 it was installed in, which could also be used as a RAM DISK.
Someone said that the name font looks like the Trump Organization logo font. Also the logo is a golden clump just like Donnie's cotton candy floss hair.
Ahem. Sorry about that. I couldn't help it. :3
Can you tell anything about how the PC communicates with it from what ICs are connected to the ISA bus? I suspect that it would be pretty tough to disassemble the ROMs and write a PC-side driver from that, but I bet if you could figure out how the Z8000 interfaces to the ISA bus, you could make *new* ROMs for it along with a PC-side driver for disk access and terminal IO and such....
That's a really neat card. Looking forward to learning what you discover about it.
Great channel too, by the way.
The two articles in BYTE magazine I think give sufficient detail to know how to interface to the card, and how to bootstrap an operating system to it. The ROMs are really just a boot loader, and the PC loads the operating system into RAM. I think everything is there that is necessary to replace the lost software, other than the time to do it -- I expect it would be quite an undertaking.
No help here. But I do remember when these were written about by Steve and the subsequent advertizements for it. Good luck!
Your not telling me yiu didnt even put it in to see if it had any... Nothing on it.
How would you know if you didnt put it in. To see.
I'm going to make a card called the Donald Trump card. An ISA vga adapter that only outputs shades of orange
A friend coined the term "dead bug mod" referring to IC's flipped over and glued to circuit boards. The other day I thought it would be cool to mount a Raspberry Pi or similar single board PC in an XT machine, however I couldn't think of a reason to justify it.
I've done the "dead bug" on some SMD chips that have a heatsink on the underside.
re: raspberry pi, use it as an HDMI capable graphics card
@@wich1 Seems like the tail is wagging the dog when using a Pi on an XT slot.
@@GnuReligion yes, so?
I see what you did there. 😂 Trump Card Trump Trading Cards
👍🏻 Liked the video!
Uh ohs! You said the `T’ word.
facts hurt?
The card like it's name sake is stupid and worthless.