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S-100 Bus computers that don't cost thousands?

I always used to recommend the AltairClone because if you didn't mind it's a 1:1 scale emulated machine with no physical S100 bus it checked every box I had for "I want an S100 machine", unfortunately they've been out of production for a while now. :C
 
It was mentioned earlier, but the Altair-Duino Pro is available and uses the same case as the old Altair 8800 Clone. The case can also be used to build an 8800C with a real S-100 bus, but the total cost is going to exceed $1K.

Though I question the wisdom of spending $hundreds on a frivolous purchase if someone doesn't have $1K to begin with. Your car breaks down and you are taking the bus...
 
Plasma said:
It was mentioned earlier, but the Altair-Duino Pro is available and uses the same case as the old Altair 8800 Clone. The case can also be used to build an 8800C with a real S-100 bus, but the total cost is going to exceed $1K.

Though I question the wisdom of spending $hundreds on a frivolous purchase if someone doesn't have $1K to begin with. Your car breaks down and you are taking the bus...
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Yep. It cost me about $1200 to build a complete system in the clone case. That amount included the case itself, Mike's front panel and FDC+, a vintage N* CPU board, vintage SSM serial/parallel board, backplane, and a homebrew linear PSU. Floppy drives not included.
 
Istarian said:
@smp For a system like the CoCo3 and nothing else, you could just pack it yourself and USPS would probably have been cheaper.
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Not in my neck of the woods.
I brought the Coco to USPS, but because of the size of the well-padded box, they were higher than FedEx or UPS.
Every time I ship (or get an estimate for shipping before the deal falls apart) I check all three. USPS is usually the highest, followed closely by UPS and then FedEx. But none of them are inexpensive.

smp
 
If you don't have much money at any one time then you need to decide what's most important to you, the S-100 bus or running CP/M? Or having a SBC that can become a S-100 system as you get money to add features. The SBC board can be a stand alone single board computer, but can also be the beginnings of a full S-100 system. See: https://s100computers.com/My System Pages/SBC Z80 Board/SBC Z80 CPU Board.htm

Over time you can add a 9 slot S-100 main board and build up to where ever your desires take you.

But if you want to run CP/M and not necessarily have the S-10 bus then there's Zeta and many other SBC's that can be built for not much money. Or vintage systems like the Morrow Decision, the Epson QX-10's. and others. Nope of which have S-100 buses.
 
You can use Pirate Shipping and save on shipping costs. They pass on a discount compared to a retail shipper gets and they quote both USPS and UPS rates. You do need to know the size of the box and the weight before they quote.
 
I learned a shipping trick decades ago. Don't know if it still works.

I bought a printer and needed to ship it from Atlanta to Orlando.
The guy I bought it from said no problem He would take care of shipping.
He shipped it air freight. For $35! This was a large wide carrage printer at least 100 lbs.
I asked him why so cheap? His response: Space available, hold for pickup.

Airlines fill empty baggage space with freight. So if your shipment can be used for fill it's not costing them much.
Hold for pickup means no delivery cost. Just a phone call to let you know it's available.
Space available will always go out pretty quick. just not next day.

Turns out the guy was a pilot.
 
It's possible that it might be cheaper in some situations, but the guy being a pilot likely made the logistics of getting it to the airport and through processing a lot easier.

Could be a lot of hassle for an individual shipping a single item with a small physical footprint. Might be justifiable for getting something like the printer you described from point A to point B safely and at less expense.
 
It could be an interesting argument. But I would recommend the SOL-20. The reason being that it has an excellent Keyboard. The Solos operating system is well designed and you can get it easily to work with Cassette Tape, or if you install the double density N* card for 5.25" floppy drives. Then all you need are the physical drives and Mike Douglas's VSG board for soft sectored media, works like a charm. Then you can easily run CP/M 2.2. My SOL-20 has been a lot of fun, especially for making home made S-100 cards for a number of projects and playing around with things like vintage Matrox video cards.
 
Hugo Holden said:
It could be an interesting argument. But I would recommend the SOL-20. The reason being that it has an excellent Keyboard. The Solos operating system is well designed and you can get it easily to work with Cassette Tape, or if you install the double density N* card for 5.25" floppy drives. Then all you need are the physical drives and Mike Douglas's VSG board for soft sectored media, works like a charm. Then you can easily run CP/M 2.2. My SOL-20 has been a lot of fun, especially for making home made S-100 cards for a number of projects and playing around with things like vintage Matrox video cards.
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The original poster to this discussion wants to buy an S100-based computer for a "few hundred dollars". The SOL-20 now typically sells for least a couple of thousand dollars and, right up there with most other vintage S100 systems, is far beyond what he had in mind.
 
hmb said:
The original poster to this discussion wants to buy an S100-based computer for a "few hundred dollars". The SOL-20 now typically sells for least a couple of thousand dollars and, right up there with most other vintage S100 systems, is far beyond what he had in mind.
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I guess the price has gone up a lot since I got mine, it was under $1000. It is getting difficult to buy the week's groceries and a few cups of coffee for less than a few hundred dollars these days, it might be hard to find an original vintage working S-100 computer, especially one with a keyboard, for a few hundred bucks, unless it was some sort of clone or emulator of something vintage. I'm sure I spent more than a few hundred bucks on various IC's and parts to get my SOL-20 working reliably and buying various S-100 boards for it, housing disk drives for it etc. I think it took the best part of $1000 to replicate the the Dazzler boards to try in it, if time was counted and to buy and repair various SRAM cards and other S-100 cards to try in it etc. I also had to have new delay line modules made for faulty processor technology 16kRA DRAM cards, even though I found another solution I wanted the original parts. Everything always costs more than you imagine, even when your imagination runs away with itself.

Though one possibility could be a computer trainer. For example the Yang Yes-5. It has an s-100 card slot, its own keyboard on the trainer, a Z80 CPU and it has a cassette tape interface and a serial interface.

But you don't have the luxury of video for a VDU like you do with an S-100 computer fitted with an S-100 video card, like a VDM-1. At least with the SOL-20 you get what amounts to a "free video card" as the VDM-1 is essentially built into it, so there is a value added thing there, and you get the keyboard too, so you have to consider the extra value accounts for at least a proportion of the extra price. I think I have seen those VDM-1 cards sell for a few hundred bucks on their own.
 

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Check out the Coco III FPGA - it runs super super fast and it should not cost much.
It needs an FPGA trainer board, a PC keyboard, and a VGA PC CRT.
You get software into it via computer connection initially, and then after you use your PC to emulate disk drives for it.

CoCo3FPGA - Davebiz Wiki

www.davebiz.com www.davebiz.com

Coco3FPGA Project How To Guide | Brian Holman: TRS-80 Coco Retrocomputing Hobby

www.brianholman.com www.brianholman.com

There is great support online:


I used to own a number of CoCo computers, now I have only this one.
After the real vintage stuff, there's nothing like a 24 MHz Coco III !

smp
 
smp said:
I used to own a number of CoCo computers, now I have only this one.
After the real vintage stuff, there's nothing like a 4 MHz Coco III !
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Isn't a CoCo a pretty out there suggestion for an "S-100 computer"?

If the OP wanted something "modern" that was in the *spirit* of an S-100 computer I would actually suggest something like the RC2014 family of homebrew computer boards. This ecosystem effectively lets someone relive the experience of building a kit computer from the 1970's, but by using more modern components the boards are *much* smaller and cheaper.

(While still being true "bare metal", IE, no emulation or FPGAs for a typical system; there are boards that do use FPGAs or MCUs like the Pi Pico to provide functions like fancy video support that would otherwise be difficult to provide in this form factor, but for a terminal base system you can avoid them, and there are also boards that use antique video processors to provide this kind of functionality.)

I know this suggestion was already thrown out there, but... I likewise think it's worth asking what it is about an S100 machine that's actually the attraction here? The blunt truth is that most S100 machines built after 1977 or so were pretty boring from a hobbyist perspective: if you want a 64K CP/M computer there are a lot of options that are cheaper, more portable, and probably more fun. If it's about having a front panel with blinkenlights like an Altair 8800 or IMSAI, well, you pretty much have to specifically buy one of those, because nearly all "second generation" S-100 machines ditched the front panel in favor of having a boot ROM. (Thus why machines like NorthStar Horizons are just big boring boxes; even Altair started selling the 8800b "turnkey" without a front panel by 1977.) The aesthetics are cool and all, but realistically you're likely to try using that front panel *once* before you decide you never want to use it again. And if it's about specifically reliving exotic "first of" cards like the Dazzler... that's really the best reason for collecting the original hardware, no argument there, it just has to come with the acknowledgement that you've decided to adopt an expensive hobby.
 
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smp said:
Well, sorry about that. I thought that we had moved on to suggest a variety of SBCs that could be had for a few hundreds of dollars.
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Had we? I mean, I guess technically it was seesawing between modern Altair emulators, things that are kind of in the spirit of an S-100 machine (IE, RC2014, Zeta, etc) but not actually S100, and (in the middle of the seesaw, I guess?) some combination of new-build and scrounged parts to make a machine from scratch instead of buying a full vintage S-100. All of these at least have some tenuous connection to the OP, in that they are solutions that share at least some degree of tech (IE, Intel 8080/Zilog Z80 compatible CPU, operating systems like CP/M, etc) and usage paradigm with the original.

If you're jumping all the way to a modern CoCo3 recreation then it seems like we've opened to floor to just about anything that apes an 8-bit computer? I mean, I have a soft spot in my heart for the CoCo, my first computer was one, but I can't say it shares a lot of DNA with an S-100 machine. (I guess we could make an argument for it relating to the SWTPC-6800, but that's a whole different rabbit hole.) If we're moving the bar that far we might as well suggest one of those new Commodore 64s? They're a pretty good deal for what you get. You can also buy a fully built MiSTer for less than $200 on eBay, and there's actually an Altair 8800 core for that. (Along with CoCo3, Commodore 64, etc.)

Perhaps the OP, if they're still listening, could better clarify what aspect of an "S-100 computer" is most important to them. A "typical" S-100 computer, circa 1979 or so, was a single-user box with 48-64K of memory, an 8080 or Z80 CPU, a couple of floppy drives (often 8", but not always) and a CP/M or CP/M-like operating system hooked up to some kind of CRT terminal, but they ranged from the original switchplate Altair with 256 bytes of memory, IE, something dumber than most dev boards, that would be incrementally expanded from kits assembled by the user, up to professionally built multiuser mini-minicomputers with multiple megabytes of memory and hard disks running proprietary operating systems and custom software that added up to list prices in the high five figures. From a hardware perspective S-100 computers pioneered a number of important technologies, like memory mapped video cards, graphics, etc, in the 1975-1977 period, but none of that was ever really standardized, which is why the stereotypical 1979 CP/M S-100 computer tends to be a pretty boring business-oriented text-only machine.

In order to really make high-quality suggestions for a substitute for an "expensive" original S-100 computer we really need to know what it is the OP wants from it. Do they want to relive building a computer from a kit and fiddling around with the bare metal like a buyer of an original Altair would have, but they don't *necessarily* care if it *is* an Altair re-creation? Do they want a turnkey CP/M computer that just happens to be a big-ol' brick, with clattering disk drives and a bulky CRT terminal? Are they specifically interested in fooling around with pioneering cards like the VDM or Dazzler (or modern recreations thereof)? Do they want to design and build their own cards and think that S-100, being the "standard bus" back in the old days, would be a good platform for getting into that? (For various reasons I don't think it actually *is*, but reasonable people could debate that point.) It really matters what the answers are here, because for some of these use cases an FPGA or emulator solution would be just fine, while for others it doesn't work at all. (And if being able to run CP/M or Altair BASIC or whatever is part of the requirements then non-8080-compatible platforms are also going to be right out.)

I kind of feel like the one thing we've pretty well settled in the discussion is that if actual physical S-100 bus slots are an absolute requirement it's not likely to come cheap. Although... I suppose it's necessary to have a little perspective here: hobbies of all sorts are pretty expensive anymore. It's pretty easy to spend a thousand bucks buying a set of oil paints or going bowling regularly, if you shop carefully assembling an S100 computer is still going to be chump change compared to restoring a classic car or something. It's all a question of if you can budget it and if you believe it will bring you joy in line with the cost.
 
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smp said:
Check out the Coco III FPGA - it runs super super fast and it should not cost much.
It needs an FPGA trainer board, a PC keyboard, and a VGA PC CRT.
Click to expand...

Just as an aside, reading the docs for the MiSTer CoCo3 core it's actually an official port of the CoCo3FPGA, with a similar feature set. (Looks like one thing the original hardware can do that the MiSTer version can't is the DE1 board has SDRAM on it which allows the 6809 to run up to a simulated 25mhz, the MiSTer version tops out at 9Mhz because of the expansion SDRAM's bandwidth limitations.) Seems like it's pretty hard to buy the DE1 anymore and the few places that have it list it for more than a complete MiSTer costs, so... is what it is, I guess.
 
But it all becomes a nonsense argument.

You either want a vintage S-100 computer based on a CPU like a Z80 or an 8080, or you want something else, some sort of modern emulator for low $.

If you want the original deal and you want it to support an array of interesting vintage S-100 cards, including a video card if it needs it, and a disk drive card, and have all of the required (usually analog) power suppies to support that with the usual massive sized iron core transformers, there is no escaping the fact that you have to open your wallet and shell out the $ to get it.

If you don't anti-up you will actually be stuck with something that costs under $200 and is more like someone's lame attempt to make an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi, act like a real S-100 computer with modern SMPS power supplies that will kill the magic more than a Tesla would over a model T Ford, or better put a V8 Corvette, and you will still have to shell out for a backplane with many sockets to support any vintage S-100 cards anyway.

In my view the idea of a cheap genuine S-100 system is not compatible with the reality of the current prices of vintage S-100 computers, or their boards and the peripheral equipment.
 
@Hugo Holden In principle it shouldn't be that hard to produce relatively simple S-100 compatible hardware. Whether that could be made available at a price considered "inexpensive" is a different matter entirely

Even just a 4-slot backplane with 1 slot occupied by one of those CPU+RAM+ROM cards ought to satisfy many people's level of interest.

If "genuine" you mean original 1980s hardware or a near-perfect modern clone; then of course it's going to be pricy.
 
So... I guess everyone's thinking this, but I'll be the one to say it...
Don't take this the wrong way, but If you want to collect vintage S-100 machines and don't have a few grand to throw around, then maybe you should get another hobby.

If you just want to explore their use from a software side, there are emulators out there, like simh.
A step up would be modern hardware re-creations.
But the actual 70's era hardware will remain expensive and likely increase in price.

If you are really dead-set on entering the S-100 world, then first work on ways to increase your disposable income.
-J
 
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