CORECO board

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BIT
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CORECO board

I received this board that I don't know.I think it was designed by CORECO in 1987 for the Apple II.Does anyone have any more information?

 

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audio

With a DAC0800, TL081 opamps, and RCA jacks, this looks like an audio or speech card.

BIT
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Could it be a video capture

Could it be a video capture card ?I'm trying to get more information from the previous owner...

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It's an advanced gaming

It's an advanced gaming  board that allows you to run Colecovision games on your Apple II...

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Check the bus connections...
BIT wrote:

Could it be a video capture card ? 

No.  It doesn't have RAM for video capture, doesn't have a DMA connection, and only has address bus connections for 256 bytes.

The top side in the photo shows the following connections:

  • Position 25: +5 volt power supply
  • Position 18: RW, to distinguish whether the CPU is reading or writing the card's data ports
  • Position 2-9: Address bits A0 through A7, to access up-to-256 bytes of ROM and up-to-16-bytes of IO ports
  • Position 1: IOSEL to access the card's ROM firmware

The 40-pin chip is a 6821 PIA ("Peripheral Interface Adapter"), an efficient but slighly cumbersome chip that squeezed 6 addressable registers into 4 memory addresses.  The 6821 is is compatible and interchangeable with the 6520 PIA that was widely used in Commodore computers.

 

The board appears to have a successive-approximation-register and a DAC.  The photo isn't clear enough to read the part numbers, but those components suggest analog input and analog output.  [EDIT:  oopsie, I overlooked that @robsespierre identified the DAC in a previous comment]

 

The 24-pin chip appears to be a 2KB or 4KB NMOS EPROM, a weird choice considering the card does not connect to edge 20 (IOSTRB) which would be necessary to address more than 256 bytes of ROM.  It seems unlikely that they could fit any useful analog-digital programming into an onboard ROM, so maybe the ROM is just used for identification.  It's possible we could learn more by plugging in the card and listing the contents of the ROM -- are you interested in trying that?

 

We could probably identify more of the bus connections if you share a picture of the reverse side of the board.

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Khaibitgfx wrote:It's an
Khaibitgfx wrote:

It's an advanced gaming  board that allows you to run Colecovision games on your Apple II...

No, this particular card is not that.

 

I don't believe there is any such card. There was a "sprite card" (https://www.applefritter.com/content/tms9918-sprite-card-apple) that had a TMS9918 chip like the Colecovision, but it did not have a Z80 CPU.

 

I guess technically some wizard of the time could have had a system with the sprite card and a CP/M (Z80) card and hacked a Coleco game to run. Maybe... I don't know the limitations of having those two cards might be.

 

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CORECO not COLECO

I have had other updates from the previous owner: the board was manufactured by CORECO Canada (and not COLECO as I erroneously reported).

The board was connected to a video camera for image acquisition wiith a special software it was possible to send the image, converted to ASCII characters, to a standard printer.

I imagine like those found in the old funfair site stalls

I hope to be able to recover the entire kit

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