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

helwie44 pointed out that the latest changes seem to have affected cursor behaviour in the P2 line of drivers. I'm still hoping to find software that accesses the graphics extension on the P30.

There's definitely support for both mono and color in the graphics extension driver in the 8088 rom. Port 0xfb00-f looks like a 16 color palette which would require 4 23K bit planes plus 4x12K for the font ram. There must have been a 80K+ vram extension which your machine doesn't appear to have had (possibly it was never built?).

P2U - CURSOR - position ok

Hello, thank you for the work of the MAME alphatronic of the Px systems.
The small CURSOR error I found absolutely a trifle.

Here the modify cursor.contains( ..)
In the current source code, in line 884 simply change the variable "vramy * 12" to "y * 12".
Already the P2U CURSOR is in the right line.
I think that's easy to take into account in the next revision.

helwie: Carl already fixed that

helwie's noticed that the P30's clock is running about twice as fast as it should be.



I'm translating his notes on banking for the Alphatronics series, and he's preparing to introduce a descendant of those machines, the Hell DS2069, a typesetting terminal for the Hell printing machines.

The pit drives the clock and I just set the frequency to 1Mhz which is wrong. It's likely 15Mhz with some unknown divider.

The changes don't seem to affect the internal clock.



I've entered the "real" time after querying internal time.

helwie has raided his archives and found the assembler source for a clock driver for the P30 that sets the PIT specifically to 100kHz
He's also included the schematics for a SASI adapter to connect an early Syquest drive to the Alphatronics. DOS on the P30 is supposed to contain the driver that is needed, and there are assembler sources to modify CP/M.
I've uploaded his stuff to the FTP.

TEST 100kHz CLOCK to P30 MSDOS -MAME

Many thanks to all wonderful developers of these historical computers - which were originally developed from the "developer-forge" sks "Steinmetz-Krischke-Systems" from Karlsruhe.

Basis was the MC80 BUS with the systems sks "KISS", then TA Alphatoronic P1 / P2, P3, P30 to company HELL, Kiel DS2069 and others like sks nano 2500 and the ITT3030.

The first test result:

test 512 kB RAM and ckockfreq. 100 kHz

My test to the P30 MSDOS with the clock to my old documents (thanks of rfka01 for the upload) is apparently with the CLOCKDRIVER on 100 kHz perfect results.
Whether this other side effects, I have not yet tested.
Incidentally, I have for me in the. Cpp code simply set to a 8088 memory of 512 Kb.

I hope an active (hardware P30 machine, Germany) user ("netmercer" FORUM Germany) could bring us some MSDOS 2.0 programs to the TA MSDOS format and make ourselves available.

You think this looks like the bastard child of a Siemens machine, the ITT3030 and the NCC1701? HELL, you're right ... and it's hell of Linotype-Hell fame.

They took the TA P2U as a basis for their typesetting system, put it in a late 70s fugly plastic case, combined it with a stock keyboard from their mother company and mixed and matched with other components from the SKS grab bag. The disk drives look familiar, as does the CPU card, although the christmas sticker is a nice touch



Lots of extra keys on the keyboard which is appropriate for a typesetting machine. The keyboards uses a different connection than the P2 series, it needs is read via the INT7.5



helwie44 was with the Hell company, and he's sent me his files which I've put on the FTP but can also be found here.

What really sets the DS2069 apart from the Alphatronic line is that it's missing a character generator. The usual Video RAM is stacked four banks deep, and the machine initially comes blank, you have to blindly type in "B" to boot and then load a character set using the "LF" command. The blank lines are a feature, the characters are 16x16 pixels.



This mechanism allows to use four character sets concurrently.



The archive contains the MOS and keyboard proms and some disks as well as the photos of the cards and lots of documentation.