Altair kit up and running.

[Geoff Harrison]

I put the finishing touches on my kit this morning, powered it up and ... WooHoo!! It worked like a champ

I couldn't believe it. I figured I must have made a mistake somewhere, but apparently not. It's been running a memory test for the last couple of hours with no problems at all.

Praise should go to Grant's beautifully crafted kit along with his detailed assembly instructions. They made it a breeze to put the kit together.

[phe]

Yipee. Good for you! I'm a few weeks behind you. I'm about ready to start the LED installation on the last board. Any tips you'd like to share in that area?

I hope I have the same success as you!

Paul

[Geoff Harrison]

That went smoothly. As Grant suggested, I inserted all the LEDs, attached the panels, then pushed the LEDs out as far as they could go and soldered them. I found it helped to slightly bend the LED leads to stop them sliding out while I was fiddling with attaching the panels. Don't bend them much, though, because you want the leads to be straight when you've finished soldering. Also, solder one lead on each LED then recheck their position before soldering the other lead; a couple of mine had slipped down slightly and it was a lot easier to reposition them with only one lead attached.

Good luck. Keep us posted on your progress.

[Grant Stockly]

I forgot to say... forget the memory test. : )

Visit the link below and run this code with an AM radio on top of the Altair (case off).

Experiment with placement of the radio and frequency setting. I've found that a cheap clock radio will pick up the sounds much better than a digital tuner...

http://www.digibarn.com/collections/...ein/index.html

Look for:

Try this with AM Radio:
000:003 Inx BX
001:170 Mov A,B
002:241 And C
003:075 Dec A
004:302 Jnz 000:003
005:003
006:000
007:303 Jmp 000:000
010:000
011:000

If you want you can also enter in the historic "fool on the hill" listing, but it takes a lot longer.

[Grant Stockly]

Here are some pictures of his kit:

[Grant Stockly]

An update from Geoff... I sold him an extra 4 slot motherboard along with his kit and he wanted to test it out!

It works great. Here's a picture of it running with 4 IMSAI 4k boards. I also included a couple of pictures showing the acrylic covers I made to keep clumsy fingers and wet cat noses away from mains voltages.

You have done a GREAT job!











You have done a GREAT job!

[Geoff Harrison]

I'm working on getting the machine to boot from an Altair 8" floppy drive. It's not there yet, but I do have it booting from a paper tape image of 8k basic.

Baby steps.

[Grant Stockly]

I hate to admit this, but I have not had the time to make MY Altair replica do this! Of course with a real Altair...

Keep the pictures and updates coming!

[Geoff Harrison]

I still don't have it booting into Altair DOS yet, but I did get Disk Extended Basic 5.0 running and accessing the disk, so I know my controller cards and drives are working. That's further than I got when I was trying to get my 8800b working.

[Geoff Harrison]

Finally, it boots into Altair DOS using a bootloader in PROM. Set a few switches, hit RUN, wait a few seconds and bam! there's DOS. Almost like a modern computer.

Next up: getting CP/M running. That will take me a while, though, unless I can find someone who already has CP/M on Altair floppys.