Hello,
I got these two cards from an auction and I think they come from the same pc. I believe one is a Sasi (scsi) card to interface a xebec HD and probably the second one is intended to interface a tape drive. I have no clues about where to find docs or sw for them. They are both from HAL manufacturer. Does anyone know anything about it?
Thanks
Luca
The 50 pin "streamer" card may be for a Pertec interface. Those were common on a lot of tape drives back in those days, especially 9 track reel drives... Cipher, Kennedy, etc.
Thanks for the clue!!
Also most Xebec drive controllers back in those days used some variant of SASI (Shugart Associates) interface, which was a predecessor of SCSI. Sider drives used that kind of interface, for example. This card however doesn't really look like the ones Siders came with. However, I woouldn't be surprised if the pinout of the IDC connector on there isn't pretty close to other SASI (and also SCSI). However, probably without some kind of documentation I'd be reluctant to try it. I suspect that the 6522 (parallel controller) is used to drive the bus with the rest of the 74LS logic controlling the rest of the signals and interfacing the 6522 to the Apple II bus. Disassembly of the contents of the EPROM would be interesting, especially to compare to Sider cards and other SASI or SCSI controllers.
I managed to dump the "APPLE 2/3 XEBEC INTERFACE REV 1" card , it's a 2732 (4kb) eprom . There are some ascii characters at offset 0E82 hex that say "HAL COMPUTERS LTD 1983 A/XHAL Shared Resource Winchester System......Disk Error - press <RESET>..Please switch on winchester."
So , as a starting point , this should be a an interface for winchester hard drives.
Luca
Here is a text copy of the binary code:
XEBEC4K.txt
Cool... when I get a chance I will disassemble that.