Guide to configuring the Solid State Music IO4 as a MITS 88-2SIO serial board

[kingchops]

For many Altair owners out there, this guide may be the difference between owning a cool retro box with lights, and a usable Altair.

It's taken me quite a while to gather up this info and many people have helped in the process. This is especially good for those people, like me, who aren't hardware engineers.

So here it is, I've written a guide on my site on how to configure the Solid State Music IO4 to work as a MITS 88-2SIO serial board. The SSM IO4 will act exactly the same as the 88-2SIO without the need to modify any loaders or programs.

Link to page here.

I'm also starting to compile some high-res pictures of the Altair and related S100 boards on my site. I've got a page for the SSM IO4 here.

 

[deramp5113]

Good stuff! Publishing the results of your hard work always helps the next hobbyist who follows down the same road!

Mike

 

[kingchops]

Good stuff! Publishing the results of your hard work always helps the next hobbyist who follows down the same road!

Mike

Thanks deramp. Your help was much appreciated. Without thinking the status word settings through, it wouldn't have worked. If I'd found an article like this when I first got my Altair it would have saved me lots of time. In any case it's always gratifying when you can work through these things.

I'm doing some work with eproms at the moment. I've given up trying to work with 2708's with my Bytesaver card, so I've created an adapter for 2716's, I've had some success, the adapter works, in a couple of slots. But I think my Bytesaver card is a little flaky. I have five slots that seem to work ok, so my goal is to at least load 4k Basic on then so that the Altair can work stand alone. Still, nowhere near as hard as getting the serial board to work!