Three questions about the Altair 8800 kit

[sje]

Three questions about the Altair 8800 kit:

1) What's the status of the MITS 88-ACR board (audio cassette interface)?

2) Is the MITS 88-16MCS board (16 KB static RAM) a candidate for resurrection?

3) Is the MITS 88-VI/RTC board (vectored interrupt/real time clock) a candidate for resurrection?

[sje]

Also,

4) Any news about the SuperAltair card?

[Grant Stockly]

Three questions about the Altair 8800 kit:

1) What's the status of the MITS 88-ACR board (audio cassette interface)?

2) Is the MITS 88-16MCS board (16 KB static RAM) a candidate for resurrection?

3) Is the MITS 88-VI/RTC board (vectored interrupt/real time clock) a candidate for resurrection?

1. I have duplicated the board, but I haven't tested to see if it works or made a kit.

2. I don't think I have any more of these. The memory chips are expensive and I'm not sure it would make sense to duplicate. The card would cost about $400-500 I think. It would be better to have an original 4k card and then make a small 32k card to add to it.

3. I wanted to do it. I have one, but haven't copied or duplicated it yet.

[Grant Stockly]

Also,

4) Any news about the SuperAltair card?

I will probably not finish working on it and will delete it from the website. Since I started it, I bought a house, got married, had a baby girl, etc... ;)

[sje]

Thank you for your replies.

If the SuperAltair board were produced, then it would remove the need for many other kinds of boards. I see to recall from a decade ago that there was a similarly specified board from Harte Technologies, an effort connected to the IMSAI revival. Is there any connection to the SuperAltair board? Could the Harte board be put into production?

One difficulty with the SuperAltair or similar board is that things in peripheral land have changed a bit over the past few years:

1) New PS/2 keyboards are hard to find.

2) New serial/USB adapters are becoming hard to find.

3) The days of VGA are numbered and perhaps the same can be said of DVI. But HMDI output enjoys the leverage of many, many low cost consumer televisions with 1920x1080 input.