Home Page Forums MAME MAME TA Alphatronic PC-16

This is by far not as common as the 8bit Alphatronic PC, it's the Alphatronic PC-16, the unloved child of an office appliance and a home computer. Too expensive, not enough RAM, too late ... it wasn't a big success.



Like the Alphatronic PC, the keyboard case contains the mainboard, and one of the two external floppy drives has the disk controller board in it. In this case, the power supply from the disk drives also powers the PC. It's another example of the MS-DOS compatible, but not IBM compatible type of computers that were around during the 80s. The MS-DOS is a special adaptation, and the disk format is 40 tracks, 5 sectors/track at 1024 bytes/sector.



The slot on the right side of the case takes the graphics card which can be exchanged for a BTX module.





I got a bunch of floppies with the machine and was able to read and image all but three.

Photos, ROM dumps (thanks again TeamE) and the disk images are on the FTP and here:

Alphatronic PC-16

Documentation for this one is hard to come by ... I got a few pages about the "Standard-Monitorkassette", i.e. the graphics card, but it's none too technical.

I've added to and re-uploaded the archive for this one as documentation for the system (albeit with some pages missing) and information for the "Autonomous Processor PCB" were found. The APP1 was an early experimentation PCB based on the Zilog Z8671 that could be programmed from the PC 16, then decoupled, and used standalone, e.g. to drive the signals of your model railway. The documentation also mentions a third graphics module for the slot on the right hand side, a "full graphics" cartridge with a 512x256 resolution, but unfortunately nothing more substantial is known so far.

It would be great if that little quirky "PC" could be emulated.

The Z80 floppy board rom, CDAE04, is mia. Hopefully you've still got it.

It's on the FTP now ... I forgot to merge this dump with the stuff that was done by TeamE before uploading.

This is the thing crazyc has been (successfully!!!) fighting; floppy disks and (planned, dunno if ever produced) harddisk on a 50 pin flat cable run from a homecomputer-in-a-keyboard unit.

That doesn't surprise me, they used scsi for the floppy for a reason and attaching a hard disk probably wouldn't be too hard. It would be interesting if any period scsi hdd would work, given the strangeness of the host side scsi though I wouldn't be optimistic.

Maybe it's SASI instead of SCSI? Although AFAIK the differences were minor and didn't involve the handshake lines.

The docs call it scsi but it predates the scsi-1 spec so it's probably really sasi.