HUNEYCUTT%gunter-adam@sri-unix.UUCP (01/28/84)
From: Doug <HUNEYCUTT@gunter-adam>
The S-100 bus in the Z-100 is indeed IEEE-696 engineered. The system supports
5 slots, one of which is taken by the floppy disk controller, another by the
Winchester controller (if you have one). You can plop any IEEE-696 card into
the machine, with one noteable exception....(sigh)
You see, even the motherboard of the Z-100 is broken into logical parts.
The memory circuitry is a 'logical' S-100 card, the video circuitry another,
and so on. Accordig to the designer, you could DMA video pictures into the
display memory if you have a DMA device driver (which the floppy controller is
NOT)
PROBLE: The CPU circuitry is configured as an IEEE-696 PERMANENT MASTER!!
This precludes the addition of a standard S-100 CPU card, as it will also want
to be a permanent master. The Zenith folks are thinking about it.
(Note: for those of you with a Z-100 already, look at the back. There is a
very long cut-out at the top (about the length of a standard S-100
card). Yup, they actually thought about extending the S-100 outside
the main box. Just think what your RFI sources could do with that!!)
Doug
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