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Motorola EXORciser

Roland Huisman

Veteran Member
Joined
Mar 24, 2011
Messages
1,464
Location
The Netherlands
Today I got a bunch of old hardware. The owner told me that it is a Motorola EXORciser system.
There are several generations CPU boards with it. Some analog boards, serial stuff, relays cards etc.
One of the boards in the machine is even a wire wrapped model.

The system was used to control the temperature in an oven for chip production.

I must admit that I'd never heard of the Motorola EXORciser before... What I found was
that the EXORciser was a development machine... The disk drive is an EXORdisk II

Does anyone know a bit more of these machines?

1.jpg 3.jpg 2.jpg 5.jpg

Regards, Roland
 
Hello Chuck,

I checked a few, they are soft sectored. So I guess I can
make images from them if anyone is interested...

Regards, Roland
 
You are lucky. The Exorciser was the Motorola equivalent of the Intel MDS development systems, and was blessed with MDOS, an operating system that is vastly better than the cruddy ISIS/CPM on the Intel offering. I wrote several programs for the MDS and Exorciser 30 years ago and it was noticable just how mature and easy to use MDOS was compared to ISIS.

The Exorciser has one of the cleverest pieces of electronics design I have ever seen, the 8" floppy controller. Consider the problem. Every 32us a byte has to be read, or written, to the disc. With a 1MHz 6800. The controller uses the 6852 data controller as the serialising chip to such good effect that the floppy doesn't need any interleave, it will read a whole track in one rotation of the disc. Not certain any contemporary disc controllers could do that.

Did the MDOS book come with it? They do turn up. Otherwise it is, sadly, just like all the other old electronics, not really any point in doing anything with it. I have just dragged my Exorciser out, found when looking for the Xebec 1410 you had, but just what do I do with it?
 
Hello woodchips,

Indeed MDOS 9 came with it. In fact there are about 25 disks with the system.
A few of disks with the eprom files on them. Probably the source...

And some disks called :
- MDOS 2.0, Mot basic
- MDOS editm
- Philips tape soft
- OS9 V1.1 exorcisor Shell Pascal
- motorola basic interperter, MPL, Cobol
- mdos 3.02 format OS9 kernels 58k 56k 48k
- 8200SYSTEM E* M6800 system software 3.05 (original motorola disk)
- SD basic compiler, ASM for mdos 9/3/80 @ software dynamics (several disks with different serial numbers)
- mdos 3.01 8209 termsys (original motorola disk)
- mdos 3.0 (original motorola disk)
etc...

Funny you mentioned the Xebec 1410. In the box with all the PCB's was also
a Xebec 1410A. (You can see it on the pictures) Now that is a coincidence! :D

But like you say, no book. Only some documentation about the floppy system and the floppy controller.
Maybe I will find a book. But also, don't know what to do with it at the moment...
I got the whole system with floppy's and boards for free. I just had to pick it up
otherwise it would have been scrapped...

Regards, Roland
 
Some info, and manuals, here

http://www.exorciser.net/excorindex_en.htm

If the Xebec is spare someone else posted a wanted thread for one a little while ago.

My software went up to MDOS 3.03 I think. Does the CPU have the 6800 or 6809? It migrated to the 6809 in the end but by then was on 5.1/4" floppies, not 8".

Do I want it if you don't?????????????
 
Well, there are several CPU boards with 6802 and 6809 CPU's.
The one in the machine is also a 6809 model.

The floppy interface in the machine is a 40 pin model for the Motorola drives
with some 68xx devices on it. Another disk controller has de 40 pin interface and a
FD1791 floppy controller. And there is also a Shugart interface card with a 765 fdd controller.

Regards, Roland
 
I've powered it up today. The machine starts with ASM8209 2.1 followed by *E as prompt.

My machine comes up with an EM error when I want to boot from floppy with E800;G (FDC start address).
If I put in an other -not motorola- disk it gives E3 of E5 something like that.
So I presume the E is an Error notification. Probably EM is a memory error I have to find that out...

Does anyone have any information about error codes for these machines?

Regards, Roland
 
Assuming MDOS 3, the EM error is insufficient memory to hold the resident part of the OS, 16K. E3 is drive not ready, E5 is disc command not completed, timeout.

On reset do you get the EXBUG 2.? prompt? If so then start MDOS by entering MAID. The E800;G is for Exbug 1.?

The original floppy controller will have a 6852, 6821, 2716 and a PLL made from the 4024 and 4040. The 1791 board is probably for the 6809 and will need a different version of MDOS, usually in 5.1/4" discs, not 8".
 
Hello Woodchips,

The FDD controller in the machine is the one you mentioned with that chips.
But the machine has also the 6809 CPU in it.

When you restart the machine it comes up with " ASM8209 2.1 ". Not Exbug.
The company which developed their hardware and software on it
was called " ASM ". So probably they put in their name instead of the EXBUG.

The machine doesn't recognise the MAID command. But it tries to boot
when you type " E800;G ". So probably it is Exbug 1.* ?

The machine is in the exact state as I got it here. All other cards
were in a big box full of stuff which came with the machine.
The man told me that the machine should boot from this disks.

In the meanwhile I've made IMD images from the disks...

If the EM message means that there is not enough memory
then it could be caused by defective memory also I think...

There are a lot of 4116 in the machine. Maybe there is the problem.
They are known as not the most reliable memory chips...

It would be a great help to know what you can do with the debugger.
So there is some stuff to figure out :sarcasm:

Regards, Roland
 
Thanks to Al Kossow, the disks are now online at bitsavers!

For those who like it, I've made good pictures from the machine and
all the cards, and I made a little webpage from it...

http://technischmuseum.nl/devices/Motorola EXORciser/Motorola EXORciser.html
(only in Dutch for the moment but the pictures will tell their own story I think)

I really wonder if anyone recognizes the floppy drives...

Regards, Roland
 
I took a job in 1981 where the company was developing products with embedded Motorola 6800 family parts. When I got there they were doing everything on EXORcisers with 8" floppies as the only media. They had two different types of systems: one had a display and keyboard integrated into the unit (EXORterm?); I think there was a card cage in the back. The other was a chassis with a card cage like these. They had ICE (USE?) modules for some or all of the chassis units. I'm pretty sure the floppy disk drives all looked like the ones in your pictures. I got the ball rolling on moving development to minicomputers that the company already had (for code sharing, backups, etc) and after that point we mainly used the EXORcisers for ICE on target systems. I designed a simple board that extended the EXbug(?) commands and allowed downloading from the minis, etc. and we wire-wrapped four or five of them.
 
Do the floppy drives have a separate +5V and +24V connector, 6 pin I think, not the 4 pin that became the standard? Or does the DC power come along the 50 pin data cable? If the latter then someone was after some of these drives on the forum, trying to find it.
 
@ Uniballer,

Nice you have worked with these systems too! In this machine is only one
wire wrapped board. It seems you have made much more in your system...

@ Woodchips,

Thanks, good to know they are Calcomp drives. The ones in the EXORdisk have a 40 pin interface.
And there is a power supply in the EXORdisk unit which powers the drive electronics.

Regards, Roland
 
I have some Calcomp 8" floppy drives. They came as part of a military computer with a really nice 6809 processor board. Not even got as far as powering them up to see what they do. The idea of the power coming along the same cable as the data has made me cautious, just in case the non-polarised connector has been swapped.

How did you make the images of the discs? Must have uploaded to a PC?
 
Roland Huisman,

Thank you, thank you, thank you! I wrote "exorsim" http://exorsim.sourceforge.net/ and can confirm that your images work in my simulator. Your images contain a working version of E - the "EDITORM RESIDENT EDITOR". The other disk images on bitsavers did not have this.

Check it out:

./exor disks1/19.DSK disks1/26.DSK
Load facts file 'facts'
'exbug.bin' loaded.
'disks1/19.DSK' opened for drive 0 (single sided)
'disks1/26.DSK' opened for drive 1 (single sided)

Hit Ctrl-C for simulator command line. Starting simulation...

MDOS 3.05
=E TEST2;S-N
MDOS EDITOR RELEASE 3.1A
COPYRIGHT BY MOTOROLA 1978


EDITING NEW FILE : TEST2 .SA:0
>HELLO, WORLD!
>THANKS, ROLAND!
>
>LIST
HELLO, WORLD!
THANKS, ROLAND!

>QUIT

=LIST TEST2.SA






PAGE 001 TEST2 .SA:0

HELLO, WORLD!
THANKS, ROLAND!
=
 
Hello Joseph,

Wonderful! Good to know that it works!

I did sent you a message on Google groups, but I really wonder how useful that group system is.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.sys.m6809/JFkd3-2C4g8/yLkfbUEEEH8J

I have also some documentation which is not on the web yet...

Your emulator really surprised me because there seem so be only a
very few EXORciser systems. And they are also a bit unknown I think...

But glad to hear that the images are useful! Did you use disk 19 as bootdisk
and disk 26 as program disk in your simulator?

Regards, Roland
 
Last edited:
Got my machine booting again! The memory looked quite ugly.
The PCB was restored years ago because the machine has been in
smoke from a fire... This smoke damaged the pins of the memory chips in that days.

Mem 01.jpg

So I've removed all the memory chips which were soldered into sockets.
It was a bit time consuming to remove them without damaging the PCB...

Mem 2.jpg

These are the old memory chips.

Mem 03.jpg

Fresh new sockets and some old memory chips placed.

Mem 04.jpg

And really Mdos booting :inlove: :inlove: :inlove:

FIRST BOOT MOTOROLA.png

Sometimes the machine still gives an EM error.
I think I have to find all the same memory chips.
And I had to use two of the 'original' ones.
Maybe they are not that good any more...

But so far so good!

Regards, Roland
 
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