Home Page Forums MAME MAME Triumph-Adler alphatronic P3 (+ P1, P2 and P4)

If they were marketed as two different machines, just make two system drivers. If the charset was an option, just add both and add a configure switch to switch between the two. In your screen drawing routine you then just take the characters from either ROM.

"Machine 1" as it's called in the current source is actually a later version of the P3. It has the PSU and voltage regulator cards, 64K DRAM card, 8085 CPU card, floppy controller card, video/keyboard interface card with the later char ROM

"Machine 2" has the earlier char ROM and the DRAM split across a 48K and a 16K card.

The keyboard ROMs contain the same code but come from different ICs (8278 vs. 8041).

So they're neither marketed as two different machines nor is the newer char ROM an add-on option - hence I thought switching the complete sets as "BIOS" was appropriate.

Both my Alphatronic P2's cases are cracked, so I'll link you to a more esthetically pleasing example:

https://www.1000bit.it/scheda.asp?id=286

helwie44's site I linked to earlier is all about the P2.

The P2's are evolutionary predecessors to the P3 with the boards and the keyboard in a single case. Mine are "straight" P2's, no P2S (2x320K disks) or P2U (2x320K disks, 64K RAM), so they've just got 48K RAM, no bankswitching involved, and 2x160K floppy disk drives, 40 tracks, 16 sectors/track, 256 bytes/sector.

Here are photos, ROM dumps and disk images for the P2 (also on the FTP).

I've redacted my PR for the P3, reducing superfluous ROM loading and added the dumps for my two P2's.
It's nice to see how the machines evolved, from concentrating RAM on one board instead of three to editing the font from using quaint serifs like on the "T" of RESET to a non-serif font.
That later char ROM crops up again on the early P3 then.

With my current pull request for the Alphatronics, I've added sound - port 0x12 was always present on the error log.
The beeper is working well, I've adjusted the frequency by ear, and if you boot the file wordstar170.imd from this
archive, things look fine apart from the case of the doubled characters from the keyboard.

I will get the ROM labels for the three machines not dumped by myself, so in preparation for that I've split the concatenated ROMs to match the others.
This has uncovered TA's mix-and match approach for the three ROMs via the checksums

If you boot the other disk image, sys3-25.imd, the beep is much lower in pitch, and you get treated to non-stop white noise.

The P2's 8085 unfortunately runs into a halt after showing the RESET message.

P30's 8088 board seems to be communicating via ports 0x08 and 0xff.

crazyc, if you could please give us another nudge in the right direction, I'd be most grateful

Hello mates (especially Helmut and Robert),

I'd want to join you. Two years ago I tried to make a P1/P2 emulator by myself, but I had to strip i down due to time constraints, and it was my final project as a simple 8085 emulator.
When you mean a halt you mean the instruction HLT? If it is, then it is waiting an INT, maybe some kind of ack signal froma another card module. Decompiling the ROM may give some kind of clue.

Whenever I had time I will send you both my MOS and char ROMs (Helmut taught me to extract them, but I lost the copies on a HDD malfunction a year ago). I think my MOS was same as Helmut's, but my char ROM is Spanish.
If you are interested, I think where you could find a US version ROMs, but it will require some research.

See you,
Jaume

Welcome, Jaume!

Yes, the P2 stops executing on a HLT instruction.

MAME has a built in debugger (add -debug on your command line) that you should try

The keyboard controller was not getting enough timeslices to clear the queue status before the cpu checked it after reading a key.

Thanks! I wouldn't even have guessed where to look.
In the meantime helwie is sussing out the keyboard matrix, I dumped and revitalised my P30 and will post about it tomorrow, and jlopezm is attempting to dump a complete set from his unique Spanish machine.

Robert

Many thanks to the ingenious developer and tinkerer @crazyc.

The timing with the change of the double button is done.

The SHIFT key can now be held and a character switched correctly.
The F1 to F6 buttons are ok. ESC exactly ok!

Now I have reworked the MATRIX. The CTRL function is missing at the moment.
I have sent the source @rfka01 for verification - the alphatp3 works great for me!

We just do not have a CURSOR in the emulation here.
I think there might be something missing on the display chip connections.
The Registe MAP is in the area 03FF0-03FFFh only as a write option.
The MOS software may use the registers for the cursor positions, red and write mus have a way.

helwie44's spent countless hours on mapping the keyboard. I'm especially surprised that he managed to find an equivalent for the P3's "SM" (Schreibmaschine) key. It's mapped to F11 and controls the shift mode of the keyboard.
I got a P30 today, a P3 with a graphics extension and a 8088 coprocessor card with its dedicated 128K of RAM. The 8088 card ROM and the 8085 MOS were a direct match of what we had from another German user, I added the correct ROM label for the 8088 ROM, verified the char ROM and dumped the keyboard controller.



This picture was taken before I moved the rightmost card one slot left, this got it booting. The rightmost slot carries additional signals for I/O cards.

The P30 is using a different floppy controller card than the P3's built around a WD2797



The three extra cards are tied together with ribbon cable:



They're the 8088 CPU card, 128K RAM card and a 32K Graphics extension that provides 640x288 pixels in 8 colours.





The heatsink hides a memory controller



This is the graphics extension:



The files are already on the FTP and you can find them here.

Unfortunately the current state of emulation doesn't like the addition of the new keyboard controller - it prints "w#" and dies



If you boot a disk on the 8085 side, it again dies after printing "w" you need a hard reset to get it out of that state.