• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Wicat 150

NeXT

NeXT

Veteran Member
Joined
Oct 22, 2008
Messages
8,149
Location
Kamloops, BC, Canada
Another pickup from VCF West. Picked it up as a free lot from a person who ironically drove from Seattle. ;)

Machine came with one floppy drive and the keyboard. The top lid and the hard drive at a glance are missing. Lots of screws were missing as well so I'll try and scavenge those today. I spent the last few days cleaning and washing the rest of the machine so I've yet to run the smoke test. There's multiple boardsets that were included in a separate bin. It looks like they were harvested from at least four or five identical machines.
I can see bitsavers has some documentation and disk images (But this machine doesn't have a quad density drive) and I'm seeing that UniPlus+ was their Unix offering and MCS was their in-house OS. Beyond that and a SETI article there's no other information about it.
 
Last edited:
Go bother Bruce at Wild Hare. He used to sell them.

My apologies that what I was able to dig up after searching several decades didn't
meet your expectations for free support.
 
Oh don't take it as an insult. I've been reading through the service docs and the brochures in my spare time for the last week. Thank you for making it available! I was just curious if anything else was hiding either of us had not found yet. The Internet Archive mostly has re-uploads.
 
en.wikipedia.org

Wicat Systems - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
(pardon the LMGTFY ;) )

68K Multibus system with space for two full-height 5.25" devices, usually a 5.25" floppy drive and hard drive. Depending on the graphics option it's either text or monochrome graphics. Depending on the board config you had your choice of memory configurations, plus tape, external disk and additional serial terminals. Wicat also sold rackmount versions without internal graphics and lots-o-serial ports and with other strange options primarily oriented at classroom or training facilities, such as multi-channel audio and laserdisc integration. I have the skeleton for one of these units but beyond a power supply and backplane it's gutted.

I had heard of them before and they are even listed on OLD-Computers.com which has not been updated in a long time but never really had interest in owning more early 80's multi-user Unix systems, but the price was Free so I might as well. :p

I can get more photos later once I get the front assembled. With the screws missing the tube neck protrudes through the card cage and it's really easy to neck it.
 
Last edited:
So I've had to somewhat reassemble my system because it came as an unassembled system but photos are photos.

CGS_12188.JPG

PSU and analog board live under the CRT. The video board is the vertical board on the left. The 6-slot Multibus backplane is on the back with a fan.
The rest of this is a serious hack. All the adjustments for the analog excluding the brightness are inaccessible with a tube installed. The tube is too long for the chassis and pokes through a hole cut in the card cage.
The backplane uses connectors with legs too small for the thick PCB. You can (and I have) pull the entire plug and socket out of the solder, then you have to pull the backplane and solder them back in.

CGS_12189.JPG

CGS_12190.JPG


The video card itself is a monster Z80 powered thing. It connects to the system I/O board with a 10 pin ribbon cable. I stand corrected and this does NOT have the graphics option.
CGS_12191.JPG


There's also this stupid thing. It is a Wicat branded component. It's just a power resistor and a 7812CT, but they have it mounted in the most sadistic way. The heatsink on the board is DC ground. The heatsink it's bolted to on the PSU is hot with the primary DC voltage. It has two plastic sleeves to separate the heatsinks and insulate the metal screw from shorting the two to ground.

CGS_12187.JPG


Ran a smoke test with just the PSU, the fan and the +5 and +12 loaded. Seemed fine. Plugged in the analog board, video board and the front bezel with the CRT. One of the drive cage supports is wrapped in electrical tape because it rubs against previously mentioned high voltage DC heatsink. That I can tell, yes this PSU is original. Turned it on and we got a raster. The tube's weak but we did at least get a raster.

CGS_12192.JPG


The hardware manual on bitsavers recommends the board arrangement with the CPU on slot 1, then ram, an extra ram board, the I/O board, then the winchester and floppy controller. I get all the LED's lit on the disk controller but everything on the ram board stay dark and the machine does nothing.. At that point I noticed the ribbon cable to the video board has one broken line, so I'll rebuild that cable and try again, then start looking at all the boards I have. There are a LOT of EPROMs and many have lost their window stickers. Al does have copies of them on bitsavers as well, so hopefully I have a backup plan if all the board sets I got have one or more bad EPROMs. I should dump them.
 
Last edited:
Video problem has been sorted, kinda. I plugged in the keyboard and got an initializing BEEP and that I can tell that's all good and working fine but I was not seeing any video. I unplugged the video board and yes, the analog board will not bring the high voltage up unless the video board is plugged in. Out came with the scope.
As you can see in the pic above the video board has really nice test points for clock, sync and video. The horizontal and vertical sync were present and seemed stable but video was not, so it was quite literally there was no video in that there was genuinely no video signal. Just sync.
Following the trace back stopped at the silkscreen footprint for R1. It's a potentiometer that has one side connected to ground, the other side is the video output to the edge connector and the test point and the third is the signal input and yes, I could see a strong video signal there. Putting a resistor across form the signal input to the output you got scrolling snow that blinked like there was a blinking cursor and the waveform on the scope changed, but not anything beyond that. I need to find another potentiometer before I can go any further, but I don't even know the resistance value. The photo on bitsavers doesn't reveal it because it would of been printed on the side.
 
*womp womp*

So I realized I had some smaller potentiometers so I made a janktacular bodge and was able to get a clean and adjustable image on the screen but what I thought was garbage from a bad video signal is in fact just garbage.

CGS_12194.JPG

CGS_12195.JPG


The display has a blinking aspect to it but is otherwise garbage scrolling diagonally. As per troubleshooting I pulled the Z80 and it was still there. I pulled the ROMs and it was still there. So that means the video output is fine, the logic is fine but one or both of the P8276 video generators are not happy. Seeing how pulling the EPROMs changed nothing about the display the character table was trashed or corrupt.
then I asked "where is that stored?". It's not on the 8276. You see in the pic above two empty sockets labeled "2716"? I thought those were option ROMs. My bet is whoever stole the potentiometer also swiped the character ROM as well....
Bitsavers does not have dumps of these chips. In fact there isn't dumps of the main EPROMs either, so I'll dump those today. There are however dumps of the ASCII and APL ROMs, but for the graphics version of this board. No they are not compatible, but burning them and popping them in does however yield the display changes and stops scrolling so this is absolutely the right path. It has also come to my attention that this is just a Wicat T7000 terminal logic board stuffed into the 150 chassis.

CGS_12196.JPG


Also I'm out of 2716's so I burned the bin files with the doubling method to a set of 2732's.
Code: 
C:\Users\...\ROM dumps>copy /b ASCIICHR.BIN + ASCIICHR.BIN ASCIIDBL.BIN
ASCIICHR.BIN
ASCIICHR.BIN
1 file(s) copied.
 
Last edited:
There's my missing character ROM. Alright I'll wipe my EPROMs and give that a shot.
I'll run through the rest of my CPU boards today and dump their ROMs if you want to compare. I am betting a few will have bitrot.
 
Al's dump of the character ROM is exactly what I needed. Again, no 2716's so I doubled the image file and burned it to a 2732.

CGS_12197.JPG

CGS_12198.JPG


Hmm, no more scrolling but still blinking. There has to be something else wrong in the display circuit.
I also received a dump of all the ROMs, so now I have at least one safe set of images for the other boards.
 
Another shot at this. I realized last night that the reason I could get nothing to appear on the screen using the keyboard is because Wicat use a Keytronics. Sure enough...

CGS_12206.JPG

fsck sake, I hate Keytronics...
CGS_12205.JPG


If I press on the pad for Set-Up I can get a terminal config menu at the bottom, which then tells me the character ROM is working.

CGS_12207.JPG


If I lean on a letter the screen will shift around a bit but the gist of it seems that the blinking cursor is being duplicated vertically as well as horizontally. there is also a stuck line in the second (sprite?) row. There is also occasionally other corruption but it repeats. So either there is bad video memory or the 8276 is bad.

Now that I've also cleaned all my boards I also tried dropping them in the specified slots and seeing what happened. The presence of the "intelligent communications interface" card and a new ribbon cable brought the RESET signal out to the T7000. I also got activity on the memory board. Probably not good activity, but between pressing reset and when the indicators halt there is a brief moment of blinkenlites.

CGS_12208.JPG


There are a ton of dip switches and jumpers on everything. There's a mountain of hardware documentation to read through. I know one other person with a Wicat and if I can, I'll replicate his switch and jumper setup and see what happens.
 
I have two WS150's. Motivation to try getting one running.
There is also a skeleton WS150 driver in MAME.
You are fortunate to have gotten a keyboard from Josh
It looks like your memory board may be for a later machine.
Josh got the big pile of boards through Dan Kohoe, from someone
in Canada in a storage unit cleanout. I need to bug Josh again about
getting pics of the boards he still has. The last versions of the machines
had 020s and SMD disks. An early "Spies in the Wire, ie spies.com) bbs
ran on one of those. I was also friends with Gary Sarff, who was the
last person supporting the WCS operating system. Unfortunately he
didn't save anything from it.

also, if you haven't come across it, the first place I ever saw a WICAT,
byte 1982
archive.org

Byte Magazine Volume 07 Number 05 - Japanese Computers (THIRD SCAN) : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Features p.34 Everyone Can Know the Real Time [author Steve Ciarcia] Technological advances have made real-time clocks simple and inexpensive. p.60 Six...
archive.org
 
Yeah Josh sweetened the deal for me if I went past his place on the drive back from VCF West. If you want board photos as well I can certainly get you front and back shots. Josh has already dumped the EPROMs from them all it seems.
The memory boards that I can tell are all 512k with ECC. So far the hardware references don't imply they are incompatible with the 150, but there's already a bunch things such as drive size which are dictated by additional PROMs, so neither of know for sure if this is a "supported" configuration. Would be nice though to have a full meg and a half of ram.
 
Further testing has not provided many answers as to what is going on with the display and at this moment the actual CPU portion is being disregarded until I can get at least the terminal half to behave.
what I find now is that entering just 1's the display is broken up in a strange manner. If we look at the screens above the first third and fourth characters display correctly. The second character is obscured by a flashing column. If you put four 1's on the screen, the second digit causes the screen to revert to total garbage and resumes the vertical bars again as soon as the third character is entered. Fill whole line with characters and as soon as it wraps to the second line the screen fills with garbage. Fill that line and it gets worse. Reach the third line and it clears up again.
The T7000 has two banks of 4116 DRAM's. Piggybacking each chip does not change how the display acts. Am I suspect that there's a multiplexing issue?

Also I've repadded the keyboard.
 
NeXT said:
Another shot at this. I realized last night that the reason I could get nothing to appear on the screen using the keyboard is because Wicat use a Keytronics. Sure enough...

CGS_12206.JPG

fsck sake, I hate Keytronics...
Click to expand...

I've been waiting decades to find out what keyboard was in the Wycat 150. Thanks for the photo!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top