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- Hacker News
- One of the biggest disappointments of the 8-bit era was the Commodore 128 not being able to use both the 8502 and Z80 CPUs in some kind of coprocessor setup.
- The Commodore 128D has two 6502 CPUs. One is in the floppy drive and you can run software on it while the main 6502 ran something else.by timbit42
- This is great, I’m building new machines on the 6502 and can use this. Thanks.by user3939382
- I wonder if anyone ever used the Z80 Softcard or one of its many clones to run something different than CP/M?by johndoe0815
- I got MP/M working on the softcard back in the day. Never really had an application for it though.by pontifk8r
- Ooh, the Z80 refresh line. You can have a program that writes to the R register in a loop and prevent the refreshes from happening.by Dwedit
- It was so much easier to do hardware shenanigans with these old-school chips where the pins on these breadboardable chips actually corresponded to memory address bits.by LarsDu88
- Sounds like the 6502 could have been doing more at the same time as the z80 for a sufficiently careful program.by stuaxo
- From Google
Manufacturing and development process: Although Microsoft developed the idea, the actual engineering and prototyping were done by Tim Paterson at Seattle Computer Products (SCP). Don Burtis of Burtronix redesigned the card, and California Computer Systems manufactured it for Microsoft
by asdefghyk - I remember my dad using the Z80 Softcard to run WordStar, which was astonishingly powerful considering how long ago it was king of word processors. I’d be surprised if some of the control keys hadn’t influenced our editors, although as a Vim user I can’t immediately think of any.by JSR_FDED
- WordStar was basically all we needed, and it still is.
Imagine if you had something that small and powerful today.
- Turbo Pascal and other Borland products used to use keys based on WordStar. These days JOE (Joe's Own Editor) still uses a similar keyset.by jhbadger
- Cool post from Raymond as usual!
I’d like to add that the hardware for the SoftCard was designed by Tim Paterson at SCP about the same time he was writing the future MS-DOS
by whobre - I've never met Raymond but based on his posts, I have a fantasy that Microsoft would make him "Benevolent Dictator For Life" of Windows desktop OS. At this point, it's the only thing that might save Windows 11 as a daily desktop operating system for power users.by mrandish
- Years later. the Apple Dos Compstibility Card (code named Houdini) could do the same thing. It had a 486DX/2-66 and a Sound blaster card on board. By default it shared the host Mac’s memory and you could run both simultaneously. But it wasn’t a great experience on either side. They both ran slower
Alternatively, you could put up to a 32MB RAM SIMM directly on the card.
Now that I think about it, my first Mac did the same thing with the Apple //e card.
- I find hosted/hybrid machines particularly fascinating, so I have a 6100/66 DOS with a Houdini II Nubus card and a Education-market LC with the Gemini-based Apple IIe PDS card that I've collected over the years.
They are ...weird... machines.
Both have a (different) extremely bespoke Y cable that are almost required, such that if you find a card separated from the cable, you probably shouldn't pay much for it.
The IIe card has a little lag in the video circuitry compared to the real thing (at least in a first gen LC host, apparently that problem goes away if you stick it in a faster machine with a 24-bit PDS slot).
Coaxing the Houdini II to boot things that are not fundamentally MSDOS is always a good way to throw away a couple hours, but it does a great job of convincing anything up to Win95 that it's a PC. Performance is absurdly better with dedicated RAM.
There are a couple other things in the family, the MacCharlie and AST Mac86/Mac286 products for bolting PC hardware onto various Macs, and the later OrangePC cards (they ended up with the IP from both Apple and ASTs offerings). The apex of "weird hosted computers you can stick in a Mac" are probably the MacIvory (LISP machine on a NuBus card) products, but those are "costly and rare," and are infamously balky even if you do get the hardware (...and I just don't enjoy Lisp).
Sun had a SunPC/SunPCi line in the same vein that will bolt a PC-on-a-card into various SPARC hosts.
Commodore had that first-party Sidecar product with a PC-XT in a box for Amigas, and there was ShapeShifter that would let you fake a Mac semi-native on a 68k Amiga. Likewise DayDream (recently updated into DarkMatter) to run a Mac environment on a 68k NeXT host, both of which "needed" Mac ROMs attached on a dongle for license reasons.
MAE is emulation, but it was an Apple-blessed way to run MacOS hosted on contemporary Unix workstations of the early 90s, which is sort of the opposite. I've managed to prod it onto a (real) PA-RISC/HPUX host, and (emulated, because my SS20 has been super balky as long as I've had it) SPARC/Solaris host just for sport - I'm pretty sure it was built out of decapitated A/UX parts and an emulator when A/UX4 didn't happen.
I'd like to round out my set with at least a IIe with a Premium Softcard IIe at some point, but I'm not willing to pay ebay prices for any of that stuff.
by PAPPPmAc - Steve Wozniak was incredibly foresighted when designing the Apple II, to make sure that expansion cards could disable the default ROMs and even disable the CPU, making this kind of thing possible. The article mentions a chunk of memory "used by peripheral devices"; every expansion card got its own slice of the address space, so you could plug a card in any slot and it would Just Work (maybe you'd have to tell software what slot the card was in). I was very disappointed when I "upgraded" to a 386 and suddenly cards had to be manually configured to non-conflicting IRQs and I/O addresses.by thristian
- Clearly Steve Wozniak was a very unique [technical and geeky] guy at that time. Thinking about interoperability at that time was prophetic.by wslh
- >to make sure that expansion cards could disable the default ROMs and even disable the CPU, making this kind of thing possible.
Today we would call this bus mastering, yes?
by TMWNN - I don't think this is entirely due to Wozniak. Early "home" computer systems were based on connecting cards to a bus (eg the S-100 bus), eg. with one card supporting the CPU, another RAM, a third for disk drive, video card etc, etc. The cards where then memory mapped, presumably you controlled the memory mapping by setting jumpers. (I guess you're saying that Apple II managed this automatically?) Of course the full story might be a bit more complicated: 6502 and 6800 used memory mapped I/O, whereas 8080 (and Z80?) had certain I/O pins coming out of the CPU.by kurlberg
- And if something didn't work he included a complete debugger inside "Apple II Machine Language Monitor" in ROM so you could always just disassemble and poke at things, pipe disassembly to the printer, read memory, change code, add own macros to CTRL+Y and rerun stuff. All that without extra software or a massive pile of printed assembly.
from BASIC:
and the machine is your playground.CALL -151 (short for CALL 65385, but BASIC can't handle unsigned INT so that wouldn't work) F666Gby Joe_Cool - I bought an Apple II and then a SoftCard. I was trying to learn 'C' and there was a compiler on CPM (Borland) but not on the Apple II.
It is always hard to go back and understand what it was like before an event. Like the Velvet Revolution. But at the time I was working on an IBM 360, mostly doing Fortran for scientists running anemometer simulations. The center for this activity was the person in charge of the 360 who could dole out time on the computer.
The power dynamic was something I did not really notice, but in retrospect this was frustrating for the mathematicians/scientist trying to run simulations. They had to queue up and wait.
Then one day a mathematician brought in an Apple II running VisiCalc. His own personal computer. He ran his simulations on that.
It was like our small world trembled as the tectonic plates of technology shifted. The power shifted just in that one instant. It was cool - how we saw the world changed in one instant.
by talkingtab