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Olivetti M19

MikeI said:
Am interested .... looks like a pretty cool piece of gear. Not sure about my soldering skills for surface mount stuff.
Click to expand...
Stuff for the pod is ready to pickup: PCB and 74ACT04.
Will be soldering tonight.
I programmed a GAL16V8B with some simple logic and will try to let DuPal reconstruct it.
I don't dare to put in my precious 40 year old M19 PAL16H2NCs and PAL14L4NCs in it yet
 
choas75 said:
Stuff for the pod is ready to pickup: PCB and 74ACT04.
Will be soldering tonight.
I programmed a GAL16V8B with some simple logic and will try to let DuPal reconstruct it.
I don't dare to put in my precious 40 year old M19 PAL16H2NCs and PAL14L4NCs in it yet
Click to expand...
I was too late for picking up the ZIF24.
Soldered anyway and because I am impatient I soldered a GAL16V8B directly instead of the ZIF24.
No bueno. Need to solder the ZIF on the pod and have to hardware debug to understand what is wrong.
Connecting to the Pico with serial says: REMOTE_CONTROL_ENABLED but it does not decide to switch the 2N3904 to power up the Omron G6K-2P-Y-DC5 to give the ZIF (which is missing) power when running DuPal_Analyzer. So also no green LED shining yet.
Another day tomorrow :(
 
I had put a ZIF40 on the Dupal, thinking that would be enough, but the pod didn't fit. I had to unsolder the ZIF40 to put in a ZIF48.
 
Small update. Soldered, this time with a ZIF24.
Still no bueno.
Will spend some of my weekend hardware debugging.
After all, not so good at smd soldering as I wished ;)
On the bright side I have four more chances to improve.
 
choas75 said:
Small update. Soldered, this time with a ZIF24.
Still no bueno.
Will spend some of my weekend hardware debugging.
After all, not so good at smd soldering as I wished ;)
On the bright side I have four more chances to improve.
Click to expand...
I'll run some tests on my end tomorrow. And I'll get back to you.
 
Do you have Discord, so we can chat more easily? With Zare, we're on The Retro Web ghislain6415.
 
It finally works. Dpdumber test gives a succesful result. Quite some rookie smd mistakes I made (non contacts) but for a first try I can't complain.
There are four more chances to improve and work more meticulously.
Before putting PAL14L4NCs and PAL16H2NC from the M19 in, I want to replicate the toolchain results of Ghislain on a Ti48 programmed GAL16V8B. Dpdumper -> dpdump2tab -> espresso followed by comparing the .eqn to my original definition.
@Ghislain thanks for showing the way forward.
 
Hi @1ST1,
Hope you can help with your vast technical expertise.
I picked up another M19 (not the one with the expansion box, that was too far for me as well) and I soldered a new curly cable to its keyboard.
For some reason the keyboard does not work (well) with my old M19.
Lights are ok, but when pressing a key, the keyboard itself gives a beep.
The keyboard does work with the M19 it belongs to.
I noticed a subtle change in revision between the two ANK1924s.
The newer one has explicit ground. My older keyboard doesn't have that.
I thought a common ground might fix it.
Do you know about different versions and different behaviors?
On reddit is a topic which is very similar. The guy can't get it working.
Any help is very much appreciated.
 

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I already used my M19 with several keyboards with DIN connectors and I didn't have any issues. Maybe you have a keyboard which only talks the AT protocol? It must talk XT protocol. Some keyboards of that era have a swithc between XT and AT mode at the bottom.

I wonder that your keyboard itself can beep? This is not PC standard. Is that keyboard for something elese than a PC?

The funniest I tried was connecting an Olivetti ET 2200 typewriter which is equipped with the ETV 2900 / VM 2000 ETV kit interface to the M19 keyboard connector. Then after loading it's driver I was able to use they typewriter as keyboard and printer (redirected from LPT1:) - but when using the ETV 2900 / VM (which are the top part of a M200 PC) this is the standard. So I transfered my M19 to something similar than the ETV 500 (which is a relabeled M19 with 3.5 inch floppy drive usinng an ET 111/112/115/116 with ETV 500 kit over serial for the same purpose.
 
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1ST1 said:
I already used my M19 with several keyboards with DIN connectors and I didn't have any issues. Maybe you have a keyboard which only talks the AT protocol? It must talk XT protocol. Some keyboards of that era have a swithc between XT and AT mode at the bottom.

I wonder that your keyboard itself can beep? This is not PC standard. Is that keyboard for something elese than a PC?
Click to expand...
No, it's a genuine Olivetti ANK1924 that belongs to an M19 with ba/191 mainboard.
 
Yes, I will mix and match to try to find out what works together. I'll share my findings here. Thanks
 
I say there may be something wrong with the MIK circuitry. The lips of the slot look dirty or damaged, but that may be a picture artifact?
M19 is straight XT, even Olivetti couldn't interfere with this because kb is controlled from FE2000. Standard PC/XT.

The only difference to standard XT is that ANK is not just a standard XT keyboard but has circuitry which reads mouse data and puts it in form of scancodes onto the systems keyboard buffer via discrete physical connections to KBC in the keyboard.

So, are you sure the keyboard beeps, and not the PC?
Do two M19s run different BIOS versions?

If the answers are the PC beeps, and two different BIOS versions, that could mean the KB is sending weird stuff due to MIK circuitry malfunction, but one of BIOS versions does not care.
 
One more idea. As I understood, you have swapped the keyboard cable? Maybe it's quality is not good. Years ago I had such an issue. The copper cables were too thin and power consumption of the keyboard too high. So too big current over too thin lines (5V, GND), so resistor value of the copper cable dropped voltage of kkeyboard controller. At the DIN connector mostly exactly 5V into the cable, 4.1V out at the keyboard, not enough that the keyboard processor was running reliable.
 
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