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Exidy Sorcerer S-100 card?

snuci

snuci

Veteran Member
Joined
Nov 22, 2012
Messages
1,551
Location
Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada
I recently purchased an Exidy Sorcerer II and in the lot were two unpopulated cards made by Exidy. I will post pics later but this morning, I was trying to find some information about the one that looks like an S-100 card. I checked over a few sessions in the past couple of weeks but could not find anything other than details about te Exidy S-100 expansion unit. Then I happened on this part of the Exidy Sorcerer manual:

Exidy I/O Expansion Kit (not needed with the Exidy S-100 Expansion Unit)
The I/O Expansion Kit contains an S-100 interface card and a cable
which attaches the card to the Sorcerer's 50-pin edge connector. The
interface card has the same bus controllers and buffers as the Exidy
S-100 Expansion Unit; it fits into any other S-100 mother board and
allows the Sorcerer to control the bus.

Further searches produces no results that I could find on what the Exidy I/O expansion kit looks like but I'd love to see if someone has such a card even though I know Sorcerer's are not too plentiful. I'm sure this card is even more rare and the build manual would be even rarer so I'm hoping to find a needle in a haystack.

Does anyone happen to have one of these kits or heard of them?
 
If you don't find a schematic or documentation, it would be an interesting puzzle to deduce the components necessary by the interconnections on the board and the definition of the S100 and Exidy bus. I like puzzles.
 
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I like puzzles too :) I will definitely take hi-res pictures and post them. I don't recall any labeling (like components) on the boards other than an Exidy logo on them but I'll double check. I also have four boxes of documentation (one box shown in my Vector 1++ thread) and there was some Exidy documentation in there but at least now I know what I'm looking for if this is, in fact, a Sorcerer to S-100 bridgeboard.
 
A suggestion- don't just take hi-res photos, put the board on a scanner too. That way you get a good square image without perspective aberration that a camera might introduce.
 
Good idea guys. I'll have it scanned today or tomorrow. JDallas, you may want to look at the S-100 Expansion chassis schematic. I would guess it's similar, if not pretty close. The only thing missing on this card would be the power and S-100 slots.
 
Both the expansion bus and the S100 card have the identical count of ICs with the same pin count; ten 14p, one 16p, and eleven 20p. That suggests strongly that its the same design pushed to a S100 card instead. I'll confirm this more closely later.

The Richardson Tx location listed on websites as the final location of Exidy when it closed in 1982 *may* be Dynasty Computer Corp. that licensed and took over the sale of the Exidy Sorcerer, including rebranding it under their own product name. Apparently Exidy didn't stay in the home computer market and refocused on arcade games.

From Wiki:
Exidy licensed the Sorcerer computer and its software to a Texas-based start-up called Dynasty Computer Corporation in 1979. It was relabeled and sold by Dynasty as the Dynasty Smart-Alec.
 
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I believe Exidy stared in Sunnyvale, California but closed it's doors in Richardson, Texas. Is that a suburb of Dallas? It must have moved head offices at some point or there were two "Exidy" companies.
 
JDallas said:
Both the expansion bus and the S100 card have the identical count of ICs with the same pin count; ten 14p, one 16p, and eleven 20p. That suggests strongly that its the same design pushed to a S100 card instead. I'll confirm this more closely later.
Click to expand...

Just curious if you've had a chance to look at this. Believe it or not, I am purchasing another smaller S-100 unit from the original owner of this card and it may have a populated version of this card in it along with the rest of the "home made S-100 expansion box" for the Exidy Sorcerer complete with ST-506 compatible hard drive controller and 8" floppy controller. I already have the hard drive and dual 8" floppy drives with software on 8" disks.

This may be the final piece of the puzzle.
 
Exidy Socerer S100:
I'll take a look at that this week. I didn't want to invest the time until I knew there was still interest in that. I have an Exidy file with all my collected reference material.
 
I'm hopeful that I will have the answer to what goes where with the populated board (if that's what it is) so it will be an exercise of interest now, as opposed to necessity. I will post a follow up post when I get the item. I did acquire two Sorcerer's so it makes sense that the original owner would have two cards. We was a member of a Southern California Exidy user group (I have a couple of newsletters in the documentation) so he would have tried to get the most out of his systems.

I am very excited if my suspicions are correct.
 
Exidy Sorcerer 50 Pin Edge Connector of S-100 Expansion

Exidy Sorcerer 50 Pin Edge Connector of S-100 Expansion

Exidy Sorcerer S-100 Adapter Capture:
I'm going to start capturing the nets from the bare-board images you've provided of the S-100 card.

The 50 pin connector at the top of the board is documented in the Exidy manual. I have the component pin-outs from the Exidy S-100 bus resident adapter which looks to be the same design. I can use that to quickly identify the positions of the components on the S100 version and identify the function of each net that I capture.

I'll work from Corel PhotoPaint to mark my progress over a copy of the bare-board images and enter the connections into my Excel spreadsheet. This should be a clean job as the source is a bare board.

Here's two useful tables regarding the 50 pin edge connector:

Pin & Signal:
Code: 
[b]PIN  SIGNAL
------------------------[/b]
01). PRESET#
02). INT#
03). WAIT#
04). Data_Bus_Enable
05). BUSRQ#
06). NMI#
07). BUSACK
08). Data_Bus_Direction
09). RAMDR# or ROMENABLE#
10). PHI1
11). ROM_PRE
12). Reset_Acknowledge
13). PHI2
14). UP8K
15). MREQ#
16). M1#
17). RD#
18). IORQ#
19). RFSH#
20). WR#
21). A08
22). HALT#
23). A10
24). A09
25). A15
26). A11
27). A13
28). A14
29). A00
30). A12
31). A02
32). A01
33). A04
34). A03
35). A06
36). A05
37). D0
38). A07
39). D2
40). D1
41). D4
42). D3
43). D6
44). D5
45). RESET
46). D7
47). +5Vdc
48). I/O
49). GND
50). GND
------------------------
Signal & Pin:
Code: 
[b]SIGNAL................PIN
------------------------[/b]
+5Vdc.................47
A00...................29
A01...................32
A02...................31
A03...................34
A04...................33
A05...................36
A06...................35
A07...................38
A08...................21
A09...................24
A10...................23
A11...................26
A12...................30
A13...................27
A14...................28
A15...................25
BUSACK................07
BUSRQ#................05
D0....................37
D1....................40
D2....................39
D3....................42
D4....................41
D5....................44
D6....................43
D7....................46
Data_Bus_Direction....08
Data_Bus_Enable.......04
GND...................49
GND...................50
HALT#.................22
I/O...................48
INT#..................02
IORQ#.................18
M1#...................16
MREQ#.................15
NMI#..................06
PHI1..................10
PHI2..................13
PRESET#...............01
RAMDR# or ROMENABLE#..09
RD#...................17
RESET.................45
Reset_Acknowledge.....12
RFSH#.................19
ROM_PRE...............11
UP8K..................14
WAIT#.................03
WR#...................20
------------------------
 
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Hi JDallas,

Just today i was looking for information on the construction of the cable so this is good information. In my travels, I saw the S100 Expansion Chassis Technical manual here: http://maben.homeip.net/static/S100...00 Expansion Unit Technical Manual 197904.pdf

It has a parts list and schematics so that should help but I'm fairly certain I have found and have a fully populated board on it's way. That's why I am looking for a cable. The second board utilizes the 50 pin IDC connector and not the card edge connector on top. I just haven't found the specs for the Sorcerer side card edge connector (spacing) but it's probably fairly standard. I found this at Digikey that I hope will work: http://www.digikey.ca/product-detail/en/C3AES-5036G/C3AES-5036G-ND/1123411

If you want, I can try to rescan the component side of the board but it is not as shiny as the solder side if it will help.
 
Very interesting. I would have assumed that the expansion chassis and this board were almost the same except for power since the expansion chassis would have needed the extra circuitry. I imagine this board did come later but I have yet to find any references. Now I do know the Sorcerer was not a big seller here in North America but there should have been mention of it. I should take a look at some of those newsletters I have and see if it's been mentioned.
 
Where is your Exidy directory?

I have paper newsletters that I can scan in from the So. Cal. Sorcerer User Group. I also have some paper manuals that might be worth scanning.
 
Ahh, same as me for now. I should create a downloadable file area. I have something that allows single files to be downloaded but folders would be better.

I scanned in the newsletters so I will make them available once I figure out how to have publicly downloadable directories in WordPress.
 
Exidy S100 Capture: Updated images below.

Progress images below.

I've connected:
1) all the pins from the Exidy Sorcerer 50pin connector.
2) all the pubs from the S100 bus.

Should finish up this weekend unless I get busy with other things.

- - -

I dug out one of my two copies of Sol Libes' book on interfacing to the S-100/IEEE-696 to get the actual new signal names because Exidy used a proposed version that I recognized as quite incomplete. About 30+ pages into the book, they documented the dimensions of the board; so I'm going to use that to add the S-100 to my Pads circuit CAD.

It popped into my head to do it a little differently than I have for prior bus boards. I'm going to create a schematic object like a component but it will be the S-100 pin-out and documented names and signal groupings to fit along the left margin of the schematic. This supplies all the standard reference information including alternate names for S-100 and IEEE-696. The signals will be grouped like Address, Data etc so that I can quickly pull a bus signal off the object for the rest of the board.

Another advantage is that this construct allows me to rename any signals attached to the S-100 board edge object per the naming convention of my own circuits. When I flip to board layout the object appears not as a component "pad" as through-hole or surface-mount but as a set of 50 pins properly sized, two sided for the 100 total, with an positioning offset to the left-lower corner of the board.

One would normally just create the board outline with the pins on the edge and save it to the library. I can still do that after loading the S-100 outline and placing the S-100 pin-edge object. This construct just makes it easier to document and connect pins in the schematic and have it automatically carry the net connections to the board layout, in any signal naming I choose.

Its so cool a way of doing it, that I have to create it. :) I guess I'll have to design some S-100 boards to justify the time.
 
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