AFTER FINALLY WRESTING CONTROL OF THE SITE BACK FROM WHATEVER DUMB@SS HI-JACKED IT, NOW IT IS TIME TO START REBUILDING!

FIRST THINGS FIRST:
I HAVE NOT DIED!
I PROMISE.
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NOW...

 
Let's see - what's been going on? Not a whole H*ll of a lot - I was cleared by the ole' Docs to go back to work - unfortunately, the place where I had worked closed down.... so....
I went to work for Kmart, a lawyers office and a Grocery Store... simultaneously. My Dr. was not happy - working myself to death she says... I couldn't keep my days straight because I was getting very little rest. After 4 months, I resigned from kmart and the lawyers office. I loved working there - but being human and all, my body couldn't handle it. Unfortunatly, the lawyer just wouldnt accept my resignation so I still work there two days a week and the other 5 days I am an assistant manager at the Grocery... Ah - so nice to be back out there. Now - the good thing to come of all of this - I had NO free time to spend the cash I was accumulating... so what did I do with it? Ordered a crap load of electronics parts - that's what! I have HD63C09E'S! LOTS OF THEM. WD1773'S, CRT9128'S AND 65C51 ACIA'S - LOTS OF 'EM! These parts will eventually find themselves for sale at this here web site, yessiree... what else? Oh yeah - circuit boards - I've ordered circuit boards for MANY of my projects... a few are displayed below...
First, we have the PS/2 Mouse Interface boards - I have actually had these for awhile, but never could get any of those d@mned cheap PIC programmers to work so I finally did what I should have done to start - Ordered a Pickit 2 from Microchip (the 2 currently has a richer feature set than the Pickit 3 when paired with MPLAB, but I will probably get a Pickit 3 later...) I did NOT buy one of those lame-O Pickit 2 clones... got the real thing - tired of gambling with this - so, soon, very soon, you folks will receive your PS/2 MOUSE BOARDS! Finally! Check It - Here are pics of the boards prior to having been routed:




Okay, what else... well there is this goofy looking thing.....



So, what the heck is it? Ah... it's just a small board that houses 28.375MHz, 28.63636MHz, 32MHz and 40MHz crystals, either SMT or thru-hole and allows me to select one of the four. This way I can test if my projects work with the timing of a PAL unit (28.375), NTSC unit (28.63636) or one of the two crystal 'hacks' for the ole' CoCo 3 - now I wouldn't recommend such an inductive capacitive nightmare for everyday use in a CoCo 3, but it comes in handy for doing tests... of course a few spares will eventually find their way for sale should anyone want one - the final product is silkscreened and soldermasked.

And then we have this thing:


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which is just a 16v8plcc to DIP converter board - I know - you can buy these things - but they all seen to have those big square pins - I needed one with pins that would plug into an IC socket for my MPI upgrade chips (I have many hundreds of the plcc package while my supply of DIP is dwindling...) Besides - it's much more fun to build stuff than buy it.

Hmnnn... what else? Anything cool? OH YEAH - a 512K SIMM Upgrade that can use ANY 30-pin SIMM, not just the 8/9 chip kind. Yep, finally got this sucker to work! Okay - it actually gives access to all of the multiplexed address lines of the SIMM, so it could be used as a 1-meg, 2-meg, 4-meg or 8-Meg upgrade by simply building up a DAT board. I shall, perhaps, make that DAT board soon... but for now, here is the upgrade board:



The final boards (in fact all of those shown above) are silkscreened and soldermasked...
Of course, I wanted to be able to add a DAT board rather easily, so I made this 40-pin socket adapter that plugs into the CPU socket, the cpu plugs into the adapter and all of the CPU pins are taken out to a 40 pin header as follows:



Other things that I've got working but not made PCB's yet are: 5 port serial pack supporting ALL signals on the DB9 connector including RI. Uses current production 14Mhz 6551's from WDC for three of the ports which are mapped as DISTO, Deluxe RS232 and Modem Pak - the other two are a z8530 - my agreement with WDC doesn't allow me to distribute these 6551 chips outside of a functioning product because they are technically engineering samples..., replacement FDC that is fully tandy compatible and supports high density plus emulation of a floppy drive via an sd card (based on the HxC floppy emulator supporting copy protected DMK images - may not be able to distribute this though cuz I don't have rights for the HxC...), 8-slot multi-pak and a few other GOODIES! 
Stay Tuned...

Steve, I'll get those disks to you soon.
Michael - the MPI has a defective "custom" chip - I'll replace it with one of my own if you want and use the broken one for development of a replacement for that d@mned custom chip...
Anybody Else... If I have forgotten you - give me a swift kick in the @ss to remind me!
I have also finally regained control of the gimechip.com email servers...
I hate hackers... mainly because they can do all this cool sh*t that I can't but also because they killed my site for no d@mned good reason. Why I ask you? Why....
Little John but no Robin Hood...
=
OH - I ALMOST FORGOT - I GOT THE 2-MEG STATIC RAM UPGRADE WORKING TOO... I INITIALLY USED A DUAL PORT SRAM FOR THE DAT MEMORY, BUT I'M THINKING A REGISTER FILE ISN'T TOO HARD TO CODE IN AN HDL... SO WE'LL SEE HOW IT GOES...