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What is this? Post Photos of Mystery Items Here (vintage computers only)

Anyone know what this is? Its a floppy disk drive with a small E86 SC400 micro controller/cpu and a 1Megabit CMOS and a smart card port.

I bought it on eBay thinking it would make a great little greasweazle case. It came with a serial smart card programmer and a few smart card adapters.
The chips are all dated late 90's. It would be nice to know what it might be used for before I take it apart. :)

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Yes, it was definitely for a public kiosk of some type that would not require any actual touch typing but more of a
"press a key to select an item" with some minor typing. Looks like it might protect the keyboard against key cap theft/damage. You would only need a single hole for the space bar, if that was the purpose. This is also appears to be home-grown or low budget as there were dedicated keyboards for kiosks that could take any abuse/spill. A long time ago, I had built a kiosk but we went with a touch screen to eliminate the keyboard and mouse altogether and had the keyboard on screen, when needed.
Sure its not for someone with limited co-ordination to reduce the pressing of two keys at a time.
 
Two trackball controllers seen on shopgoodwill.com. What computer or system are they for?


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Early Apple II's. They had this dip-type style of connector which went into an empty socket inside.
 
Early Apple II's. They had this dip-type style of connector which went into an empty socket inside.
Sanyo MBC-55x PCs also used the header thing too. I had to make an adapter from the header and socket to a 15 pin mounted to the outside when I had a Sanyo MBC-555 back in the 80s
 
Anyone know what this is? Its a floppy disk drive with a small E86 SC400 micro controller/cpu and a 1Megabit CMOS and a smart card port.

I bought it on eBay thinking it would make a great little greasweazle case. It came with a serial smart card programmer and a few smart card adapters.
The chips are all dated late 90's. It would be nice to know what it might be used for before I take it apart. :)

*images*

Oh that brings back memories.
That's a kit from back in the days when you could still crack access keys on DBS receivers or emulate some smart cards to work around rolling key changes. I've never seen a version though that had a floppy drive though. Most of the brands I see on them are fly by night and are about impossible to find now. I do have a few other boards I've found voer the eyars that were even mroe primitive and go back to the days of UV etch PCB's.
 
I've had this floppy controller for a few years and I'd love to find a maker or more information about it. It's a full size 8 bit ISA floppy controller with its own BIOS. The BIOS on this seems like it's bad; it has a large offset at the beginning of the file so I was hoping to find someone with this same card so I can get a valid dump. I've looked and looked for anything like it, but have not been able to come up with anything. The AM2732 BIOS chip says 800-u7-c. I've attached the dump of the BIOS.

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Anyone know what this is? Its a floppy disk drive with a small E86 SC400 micro controller/cpu and a 1Megabit CMOS and a smart card port.

I bought it on eBay thinking it would make a great little greasweazle case. It came with a serial smart card programmer and a few smart card adapters.
The chips are all dated late 90's. It would be nice to know what it might be used for before I take it apart. :)

View attachment 1240564
Those smart card adapter boards were for pirating satellite TV. They are no longer used. Perhaps the programmer with the floppy drive was a portable way to re-program the smart card boards? The boards would be used in place of the smart card in a satellite TV receiver.
 
This one's more for fun, but for the past few years, when I get bored, I try to figure out what PCBs were used in the main prop from Electric Dreams from 1984. I've only ever been able to identify the one in the top left, very obviously a 5.25" disk drive controller card from something like a Tandon drive. It's bound to be a mish-mash of actual, real parts, since the rest of "Edgar" were off-the-shelf components such as a DEC LK-201 keyboard and two Apple Disk ][s.

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Top left looks to be the electronics from a Tandon floppy drive--the connectors and headers give it away.

Those upright cards with the discrete transistors don't appear to belong to the board they're attached to--perhaps the connectors were added by the prop guys.

That Intel part with the gold cap could well be an 8008 MPU--it seems to have the right number of pins. I wonder if the large board with all of the EPROMs is a CPU board that belongs to something like an early terminal.

Got any other shots of the beast?
 
Top left looks to be the electronics from a Tandon floppy drive--the connectors and headers give it away.

Those upright cards with the discrete transistors don't appear to belong to the board they're attached to--perhaps the connectors were added by the prop guys.

That Intel part with the gold cap could well be an 8008 MPU--it seems to have the right number of pins. I wonder if the large board with all of the EPROMs is a CPU board that belongs to something like an early terminal.

Got any other shots of the beast?
Unfortunately those are the only two good shots of it's innards in the whole film. You really only ever see the outside, which, aside from the peripherals, was 100% custom-made for the movie.

Also, you're right about the upright cards and slots being added by the prop guys, the cards don't even have connectors!
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It's a shame that the resolution isn't good enough to read some part numbers. Bit of a sloppy chop-job getting those cards to fit into the added connectors, but hey, it's a prop and nobody's going to notice, right?
 
Could the "foundation" PCB be from a period arcade? Some look similar:

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Could the "foundation" PCB be from a period arcade? Some look similar:

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Very possibly, I didn't even think of that. That opens the floodgates for even more potential sources.
A few more observations: there's two boards forming the bottom layer, the gap between the two can be seen in the first pic, to the right of the socketed EPROMs. In light of the arcade possibility, I did a quick scan through the usual suspects of popular late 70s/early 80s arcade motherboards, and they all have one thing in common: the ground plane is beefy and runs nearly to the edge of the PCB, while the ground plane on the boards in the screenshots are much thinner and leaves a several centimeter gap from the edge of the board.

Also, don't trust the larger 40-pin chips. I'm almost certain at least 3 of them are dummies glued into place, probably to visually give the boards a more higher-spec look.
 
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