Hi everyone. I guess I've been bitten by the retro computer bug. I'm building a Ben Eater 6502 kit with plans to evolve it into an Apple II like board over time. I found an Apple II plus for sale locally and figured it'd give me a good reference/comparison.
It had the usual Disk ][ card and a Microsoft card in it that I'm still trying to figure out. It also has a card labelled "Synergy-Card" manufactured by Spies Laboratories. Chip dates are all 1981. I found 1 hit online for this card. Seems to be a combination serial, parallel, 64K ram, clock, calendar, timer and BSR ultrasonic control (?). Card looks fully populated.
Does anyone have more info on this? I'd like to have a play with it and see what I can get it to do. Is there a "master reference" for various peripheral card I can check?
https://archive.org/stream/softalkv2n09may1982/softalkv2n09may1982_djvu.txt
Thank you
Peter
Pics of the card front and back would be a great start.
Good point. Card was inserted in the slot closest to the powersupply. Based on the instructions from the linked doc, you move a ram chip from the Apple II board to the card and plug the pigtail into the empty socket.
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I've never seen one of those. It looks like a 16k RAM card (language card replacement) plus a Real Time Clock and a Parallel printer port multifunction card. Pretty cool. Not sure how you address the clock or parallel port given most software for that usually is designed for cards that live in other slots cards intended for slot 0 normally don't use geographic I/O addresses or ROM space, and clock and printer cards usually do both. I would guess the software for that card runs from main memory.
Bus connections on front:
Bus connections on rear:
Yuck. It will function as an ordinary slot-0 RAM card, but beyond that it's just too clever by half...resulting in a design that's so kludged to work around all the impairments of slot 0 that it essentially offers none of the benefits of all its extra features.