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

Thanks Vas and Duke for navigating me through hitherto uncharted territory (for me )

crazyc has laid the groundwork for the emulation of the P30's 8088 card ... thanks once again!

A guy on the German VzEkC forum measured the output of the graphics extension card to the 9pin D-sub connector on the back of the machine and found TTL level R-G-B, 50Hz VSync "with a negative pulse" and 15.6kHz HSync.

He describes that in order to use the bootable MS-DOS disk he had to rename the config.sys file so the driver disdeu.sys wouldn't be loaded as that would cause the display to scroll and blank.

Could it be that the graphics extension is only meant to serve the monitor on the digital output and disdeu.sys is a monitor switcher?

There's a spurious "w" character generated on reset of the P30 ... dunno where that's from. I hope the firmware dumps are OK.

There's two monitors? There's no second crtc so it must use the same timing as the first one. Disdeu.sys is probably for localization (deu for german) and it forces output to the extension as before it's loaded the displayed text is passed to the 8085 for output to the first monitor. If you look at the disk image you can see remnants of files like diseng.sys.

Here are the connectors for the P30



The P3 on the other hand is missing the 9 pin D-sub below the Cinch connector.



I had forgotten to take pictures of the connectors when I got the machine.

Edith says: I don't have the digital monitor to go with the graphics extension, just the composite one.

Not loading disdeu.sys keeps the output on the first monitor, but the keyboard is not working on the P30.

The P30 keyboard controller program isn't quite compatible with the 8278. If I ignore the keyboard clock it misbehaves in the same way as the 8278 so I added a hack which works even though I don't think it's correct.

Nice! The keyboard controller on the P30 is a NEC D8741AD. I'll ask in the German forum for software to try in the P30 emulation.
Is it possible to allow split screen for the graphics extension like on the Rainbow driver?

If possible, we should get a dump of that MCU.

LN

Not without some difficulty as there's not really any simple way to bind two screens to one crtc. Note the graphics extension still doesn't work properly, that shot is with disdeu.sys disabled.


It's dumped and emulated. Also, the P3 driver has a dump of the 8278 (which is an 8041 with a standard program) so if there are any other drivers that use an 8278 but lack a dump of it, that one should be just able to be dropped in.