Home Page Forums MAME MAME TMS-09xx/1xxx thread (was New Dumps)

Hi guys,

One of the things I used to have was a GE 7-4880 Great Awakening clock radio. Sadly, I got rid of it after the keypad stopped working. There was something that was really great about it.

I was looking at ebay and saw a picture of a motherboard and it looks like it uses a TMS1100RLL as the controller.



Maybe someday, there'll be an emulation of a clock radio 8-)


In the video below, you can see the cpu on the board at the 4:32 mark

Seems like that would be relatively simple to emulate. Need to get a broken one on eBay and send it to Sean or whoever can dump TMS1100s.

GE also made a less featureful model that was numbered 7-4870 they dubbed the "Computeradio". They're a little bit cheaper but I would imagine they'd use a similar design.

I always wondered exactly what they meant by "programmable" clock radio, I guess it refers to programming your favorite radio stations into the memory.

I was thinking about why I liked the 7-4880 so much and I'd have to say is because the "UI" was so logical and well designed. The display had modes for alarm 1, alarm 2, time, radio and sleep, but you could set the fm station from any mode by pressing fm, typing 981 and enter (to set 98.1 for example). You had a "C" button to clear off any entry, up and down buttons for tuning the station, and an OFF button well separated from the main keypad. Also the buttons were in two different colors to help you identify them.

The design was absolutely brilliant. I'd have kept mine if the buttons hadn't stopped working. I never thought in a million years that it would have an actual CPU inside that you could dump. 8-)

I would make the same guess. Back then, these kinds of appliances were possibly the most commercially important applications for early nonvolatile memories such as the ER1400.

I used to have one of those when I was a kid. Was my grandma clock. She had the one on the left. One of the best clock out there.

Problem is you can't get the radio to work on MAME.

I was thinking that you could have something like a Griffin Radioshark on your system and control that possibly with some system calls.

Or a simulated radio just playing mp3s maybe.

I've seen some arduino FM radio kits that were interesting.

Some stickers from a GE 7-4870 and a 7-4880:

Sean decapped the Sinclair Cambridge Programmable (actually the Radio Shack brand of it). It's on a COPS MM5799 MCU. I'll add it to MAME in a minute.

some links for reference:
- http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/camb__programmable.html
- http://www.caffnib.co.uk/calculators/sinclair_prog.html
- http://www.suppertime.co.uk/blogmywiki/2018/09/sinclair-nim/ (Sean commented)
- manual: https://archive.org/details/cm_Sinclair_Cambridge_Programmable/mode/2up
- program library: https://archive.org/details/sinclair-cambridge-programmable-program-library/mode/2up

Can anyone identify this? I don't think it is a calculator.
Sean bidded on it but didn't win.

PCB label: (8)FJ, PB-074, MADE IN TAIWAN 80-210089
MCU: Fujitsu MB8841
45 buttons (9*5)
7seg leds above, on-off switch below
has a piezo speaker

https://www.ebay.com/itm/334021498783?ul_noapp=true&nma=true&si=jshu7zJTzcPIJr1NUGfQwL%252F%252FC%252F0%253D&orig_cvip=true&nordt=true&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2557

That board was sold by all electronics sometime in the early 90's. I know, because I bought several of them. It was some kind of electronic scrabble game. Pretty sure it's this:

http://www.electronicplastic.com/game/?company=&id=740

I pulled the 14 segment displays and ULN2804's off the boards for re-use and the balance is long gone. All electronics had a habit of selling weird stuff like that; I bought three brand new super a'cans from them for $4.99 each in the late 90's.

As for the "radio shack sound effects chassis", I had been looking for that for a long time. I couldn't find the RS part number, since it was only advertised in a monthly flier, and never in the catalog proper. I did a bunch of ebay searches, but never found it because I didn't remember them calling it a "sound effects chassis". I had bought one when I was 10 or so, and had fun playing around with it, and then one day it quit working. I highly suspect it quit working because I ran it on 9V. The paperwork that came with it said to run it at 9V, which I did, and the PIC (which is a 5V part) got quite hot. I didn't know until after I dumped the ROM from it that it was an actual released electronic game.

Tronica: Space Mission has now been preserved in MAME

The game is based on the Sharp SM5A and the gameplay is similar to G&W Octopus.



Game case and inlay scans has been uploaded here. The inlay was hard to scan and is a bit dark. If someone wants me to redo it, please let me know and I can give it a try.