Zilog System 8000

[Al Kossow]

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/zilog/s8000/03-3200-01_S8000cpuHw_Sep82.pdf
has the schematic

 

[smbaker]

If it's the seller I'm thinking of, he sold two of them minus the CPU boards, and sold 3 CPU boards in a separate auction.

I emailed him on eBay prior to the auctions closing, but he either didn't care, or didn't understand the issue.

It's a pity I didn't bid higher on the CPU boards. I put in a bid, but it wasn't enough, and I didn't know I was going to go binge-building Z8000 computers at the time.

 

[tpaxia]

Not sure if this will help but the Commodore 900 uses a Z8001 CPU and 8010 MMU as well.

I was fortunate enough to have the source code for Coherent (a port for the C900) on my hard drive. Thanks to Poul-Henning Kamp at DataMuseum.dk, he extracted and published an image of my hard drive here: http://phk.freebsd.dk/misc/cbm900/ Maybe some of that code could help?

There was a MOS Technology internal memo containing a "Custom MMU proposal" for the C900 here that contains some information that may be useful: http://vintagecomputer.ca/files/Comm...20Proposal.pdf

Hope this might help someone.
Santo

Hi, the site is not available. Did you have the kernel source for the Z8000 coherent or the regular x86? I would be interested in the sources for the kernel and the compiler...
Thanks

 

[Chuck(G)]

Are you looking for the CBM900 site? It's definitely on archive.org

 

[tpaxia]

Are you looking for the CBM900 site? It's definitely on archive.org

Thanks!

 

[unklstewy]

If it's the seller I'm thinking of, he sold two of them minus the CPU boards, and sold 3 CPU boards in a separate auction.

I emailed him on eBay prior to the auctions closing, but he either didn't care, or didn't understand the issue.

It's a pity I didn't bid higher on the CPU boards. I put in a bid, but it wasn't enough, and I didn't know I was going to go binge-building Z8000 computers at the time.

Scott,

I figured if anyone had one of these Z8000 machines it would probably be you.. Love the youtube content by the way.. I am very impressed by the Clover stack.. I have been referencing your cards for video and keyboard controllers, as well as a speech processor for some of my systems.

Thanks for the great content.

-Casey

 

[unklstewy]

If it's the seller I'm thinking of, he sold two of them minus the CPU boards, and sold 3 CPU boards in a separate auction.

I bought the machine with serial number: 5938

It's on it's way here and have been redrawing the schematics that Al has referenced in the archives. I even have most of the logic chips in stock and a couple of the CPU's on order. Hopefully I can spin out a decent replica board for the main 'Central Processing Unit' on a modern pcb. It won't be a visual replica, because I haven't seen any of these main CPU boards before, but it should a functional replica, pending all the rom data and such are functional. If not .. might have to do something about that. Hoping to be able to run the CPM8k images, maybe with some bios modification if necessary..

-Casey

 

[Al Kossow]

Hopefully, he packed yours properly
The one I bought was thrown into a box with a handful of packing peanuts and
UPS destroyed the heavy aluminum case and left the packing peanuts as little shards that I'm still picking out

 

[unklstewy]

Hopefully, he packed yours properly
The one I bought was thrown into a box with a handful of packing peanuts and
UPS destroyed the heavy aluminum case and left the packing peanuts as little shards that I'm still picking out

Holy crap, that does not sound encouraging. I sure hope it comes intact. If not I suppose I could always use buyer protection.

I noticed mine is coming in two separate parcels.

-Casey

 

[duewix]

If anyone is interested, I won the auction for the CPU boards. I don’t need all three so if anyone is interested, I’m open to offers. I’d prefer an interesting trade to cash.

 

[unklstewy]

If anyone is interested, I won the auction for the CPU boards. I don’t need all three so if anyone is interested, I’m open to offers. I’d prefer an interesting trade to cash.

Oh definitely interested...

What do you consider interesting? I could do cash as well.

-Casey

 

[smbaker]

So glad that all the parts ended up in the hands of people who found their way here! Hopefully a working system or two can be put together.

Did anyone end up with an HDD with a salvageable image on it?

 

[unklstewy]

So glad that all the parts ended up in the hands of people who found their way here! Hopefully a working system or two can be put together.

Did anyone end up with an HDD with a salvageable image on it?

I have a finch drive and controller in my system, here's hoping the heads were parked. Once I get a CPU board, and ECC board, and some memory I can certainly check. It would be good to be able to image it and archive the os and data.

I have a feeling that I might be chasing some unobtanium but I will keep looking. I did find the memory board schematics so I was going to work on that after my CPU schematics. The ECC board would also be in my too list.

I would be willing to loan out the Finch drive and controller to anyone with a booting stack, if they wanted to try to image it.

The only person I've even seen working with a Finch drive is Usagi Electric on youtube, but his drive is formatted for a Centurion system.

Casey

 

[duewix]

Oh definitely interested...

What do you consider interesting? I could do cash as well.

-Casey

I am always looking for vintage networking gear - UB, cbus Cisco, proteon, FDDI etc. I also tinker with multibus boards and VME. Or prototype hardware. Or, just shoot me a cash offer - I’m hoping to get a system together for myself and a friend has one at his museum we are keeping alive so I could let one go to a good home 😊

 

[unklstewy]

I am always looking for vintage networking gear - UB, cbus Cisco, proteon, FDDI etc. I also tinker with multibus boards and VME. Or prototype hardware. Or, just shoot me a cash offer - I’m hoping to get a system together for myself and a friend has one at his museum we are keeping alive so I could let one go to a good home 😊

Ok cool, uhmm.. I have a couple pieces of legacy Cisco Gear. I also have a complete decommissioned fiber channle NAS setup with something like multiple TB's of storage and cache drives. All Sun Microsystems of storage just sitting in my garage. A Juniper 10gbe fiber channel switch, multiple 10GBE FC interface cards.

Would probably require freight lading to ship it all out. LoL. But we could work something out. I think each drive is 320GB 15k SAS and there are something like 30 drives.


.

Or $125.00 + Shipping and Insurance?

I am in Charlotte, NC if you are anywhere within say driving distance, 5 or 6 hours.

I drove that far last week to pickup a complete IBM 5160 system. From CLT to Richmond.. I may have a problem.

-Casey

 

[unklstewy]

Oh, I forgot to mention these, but not exactly vintage. I have quite a few UpSquared SBC's. New old stock,.

X86 based with raspberry pi compatible 40pin gpio. The sbc's have 2gb of ram and 16gb emmc storage. They also have complete enclosures. I saved a couple cases of them from e-waste.

I've found that they make quite decent arcade systems, and with qemu+linux they make excelllent retro gaming systems.

Or just about anything you would use a Raspberry PI4 2GB for. Kipper 3DPrinter, etc.

They still retail for 200 dollars, I would be willing to trade 4 of them for a cpu board.

-Casey

 

[unklstewy]

@Al Kossow and All:

BTW: After some googling around I found this excellent reference collection on a german site.

Oliver Lhemann's Excellent S8000 and P8000 Research Page.

pofo.de: Zilog S8000

The user has created some great modern drawings of the schematics for the Central Processing Unit, Backplane, 1 MEG Memory Boards

 

[duewix]

Oh, I forgot to mention these, but not exactly vintage. I have quite a few UpSquared SBC's. New old stock,.

X86 based with raspberry pi compatible 40pin gpio. The sbc's have 2gb of ram and 16gb emmc storage. They also have complete enclosures. I saved a couple cases of them from e-waste.

I've found that they make quite decent arcade systems, and with qemu+linux they make excelllent retro gaming systems.

Or just about anything you would use a Raspberry PI4 2GB for. Kipper 3DPrinter, etc.

They still retail for 200 dollars, I would be willing to trade 4 of them for a cpu board.

-Casey

You’ve got a deal! I’ll PM after the holiday and we’ll work out the details.

 

[unklstewy]

Sweet, looking forward to the DM!

Thanks for the hookup!

-Casey

 

[unklstewy]

@duewix

Thanks for the barter opportunity, your UpSquared systems are on the way, I sent them 2 day priority.

-Casey