Re: Cine Exorcisor

On Mon, 12 Oct 1998, Matt Rossiter wrote:

> I know I'm a bit late - but could someone fill me in on this? Having
> something like this may make my life easier at the moment.
>

        I took the Cine. Exorcisor schematic that Dave Fish extracted
from Steve O.'s Exorcisor and fitted it to a 1-chip PLD (an AMD
MACH210.) Al Kossow made a few boards, and populated about 6 of
them. I distributed (or promised -- don't panic if I promised you
one but you haven't gotten it yet :) ) these 6 boards to people in
what, I'll be the first to admit, was a very subjective manner.

        This came up on RGVAC about a month ago, and I put out a
feeler to see how many people would be interested in buying one at
the cost of $50 - $100 if I have another batch of boards
professionally done. I got maybe 4 or 5 replies -- definitely not
enough to warrant having any done.

        I still have some unpopulated boards left, but I need to
work out the details about how I would distribute them if I were to
populate them. One of the reasons for this is that these "rev A"
Exorcisors have a design flaw -- I didn't buffer the outputs of the
MACH part, and it is uncertain whether or not those parts can
drive the cables reliably. I've gotten it to work with some fancy
cables, but I can't emphatically say that every Exorcisor will
work fine, no matter what.

        Just a reminder: A Cine. Exorcisor is only useful if you
have a Signature Analyzer. Some compatable Signature Analyzers are
the HP 5004, the Atari CAT Box Sig. Analyzer, or I've been told that
the Sig. Analyzer that comes as part of the Kurtz-Kasch test
setup will work (I know very little about the Kurtz-Kasch setup --
that's just what I've been told.) Also, an Exorcisor can only
diagnose a RUNNING Cinematronics CPU board. i.e. if the LED on the
board comes on and stays on, an Exorcisor will do you no good until
you repair the RESET circuit (and the board still doesn't work.)
Also, you'll need to make your own Exorcisor cables (One of the
cables is on the borderline of "tedious" to make, and I don't have
to time to do it for everybody that wants one.)

        The manual that Dave Fish wrote (and is up on spies) does
an excellent job of explaining the process, and everything in Dave's
manual applies to my Exorcisor repro.

        Although I've purposely sort of dodged the question of "Can
I get one of those from you in the future," I hope I've answered
all of the other questions out there about "my" Exorcisor.

Joe
Received on Mon Oct 12 13:43:53 1998