Mindset owners

[atarimuseum]

Hi,

Looking for fellow Mindset 80186 owners out there, I have 4 M1000's with expansion modules, I have all of the various expansion modules: serial, parallel, modem, memory and some nvRAM carts, boxed joysticks and mice.

I'm wondering if anyone has found schematics or any technical docs, I have done some digging, besides Mindset being founded by the former head of Atari's Computer Division in the early 80's - Roger Baderscher, a former Atari engineer - Chri Rhodes was involved in the Mindset design.

Now the Mindset has semi-decent compatibility with the PC, I would like to try and see if an ISA bus could be mod'd to a Mindset so that a network card could be added or better, to design a simple network card to plug into the expansion ports.




Curt

 

[mbbrutman]

I remember seeing the Mindset at a large computer show in 1983 or 1984. Mind-blowing color for the time.

I have some experience getting ISA cards to work on slightly less-than-compatible machines, like the PCjr. The ISA bus is very easy to understand. Unfortunately, you need to know the pinouts for the bus on your machine, and without that you are either going to be using trial and error or hosed.

You could use a digital oscilloscope to find what lines are which - that's not too bad on those machines. There are 8 data lines, 20 address lines, and some miscellaneous lines for power, clock, DMA, IRQs, etc.