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Question about Sol-20

falter

falter

Veteran Member
Joined
Jan 22, 2011
Messages
6,573
Location
Vancouver, BC
Hi there,

Dumb question. Does a Sol-20 require some cards in its slots to function? I'm looking at one that the vintagecomputermuseum guy has at $1300.. no cards in it at all. In the documentation they describe it as a 'single board' computer. But I had thought they required 'personality cards' or something like that. Wondering what one with no cards would be worth.

Thanks!!
 
Yes it does require a s100 ram card and a PT personality module. Post the link to the one your are looking at and we can see if you have the personality module. There is one on eBay that looks like someone took a rattle can to. The finish is far from original, so who know what also is going on under that spray can paint.
 
Is it just me, or does that SOL look to have been repainted? It's just not the right color. Too bright.
Also, no personality card!
 
You should be able to boot with just the personality module installed because (ROM at C000) assuming the tiny amount of RAM used by SOLOS is also installed on the motherboard and is functional. Alas there is no SOLOS ROM installed so this is not going to be a functional unit. Looks to have been repainted. I'd rather have a dirty but complete unit. This seller is not known to be a boy scout... you should know what you're doing use caution or you'll get burned..
Bill
 
Nama said:
Is it just me, or does that SOL look to have been repainted? It's just not the right color. Too bright.
Also, no personality card!
Click to expand...
It's also got yellow peel and no spatter coat. They used to have more pics of the unit where you could really see it was a poor repaint, but now they lowered the price and pulled those pics.

Cheers,
Corey
 
Kind of been curious about this guy since he showed up on ebay. Namely where he gets all this stuff and what his objectives are, since his prices are usually way too high to really move things.
 
He *does* move things - look at his feedback score and sales. THere is a very large retail market out there, he is a pro at selling vintage gear to that market. He buys his stuff from ebay and other places as I have seen him resell items that were on ebay just recently before. You could criticize him but one has to admit some of that is really just a little jealously for making good money, eh? Driving up the prices? He sometimes leaves out details when they're not favorable about the item, but he does not misrepresent anything either. Caveat emptor but it's just business. I give him credit for knowing his market very well.
 
I don't begrudge the guy at all. If I could make a living off of my hobby I totally would (that's a lie, I'd never be able to sell anything :)). I just wondered where the supply came from. Flipping ebay stuff can be tricky -- people *can* check past sales, and of course can see other stuff from other sellers for sale and totally price shop. And shipping these days is insane. I'm a fairly serious collector but shipping from the US has stopped me cold for now (well, sort of.. I grabbed a ZX80 last week... *that* shouldn't cost too much to ship, I hope). That's the one thing I hate with ebay. And where I live -- just not a lot of vintage stuff on craigs, etc. Would really love to find something from the mainframe era but that all seems to be cropping up south of the border.

I'm not sure the vintage market is that large either -- I've noticed a steep drop in prices on a number of things people used to fight over. The really rare stuff will always have fans I guess, but how would a vendor ensure a steady enough supply at a cost they could make money on? And how many will there be from generations that have never known anything but iphones?

Anyway, I figured there had to be something up with that Sol at that price. Just didn't quite understand the personality thing that well.
 
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I think it's super annoying, all eBay does is drive up the prices of vintage stuff and make it difficult for people to get into the hobby. I'm lucky to have a Vector MZ system because a friend sold it to me a for a "fellow vintage enthusiast" price and not the price you's see something like that go for on eBay.

It's silly to see things like Vector Graphic 64K RAM boards that there were lots of made, and you can almost always find 1-2 of them on eBay (so there are plenty being sold) and have people asking $150 for them. Hell, I saw a NEW BUILD Zeta SBC+Floppy Drive combination, a hobbyist board anyone can make with all new parts, go for over $300.

The last minute sniping is obnoxious and penalizes people who have slower internet. Lost out on a nice PDP-8 because I was on satellite internet and had to bid a handful of seconds in advance of the end of the auction to make sure my bid went through. As far as I am concerned with all the sniping programs and services people use, eBay should just give up on the traditional auctions, make it so everyone puts in a single bid for the highest amount they are willing to pay, no one sees any of the other bids, and it just picks the highest bid at the end of the time. That's effectively what the sniping programs make the auctions be, might as well formalize it and make it actually work that way.

Not a huge fan of eBay at all.
 
MarsMan2020 said:
... eBay should just give up on the traditional auctions, make it so everyone puts in a single bid for the highest amount they are willing to pay, no one sees any of the other bids, and it just picks the highest bid at the end of the time. That's effectively what the sniping programs make the auctions be, might as well formalize it and make it actually work that way.
Click to expand...

That sounds like a great idea to me. Most of the time that's what I do anyway - simply put in my maximum price that I'm willing to pay in one bid, and let the others fight it out, or the snipers do what they will. Sometimes I win, but most of the time one of the crazies with too much money wins.

smp
 
A lot of the really interesting S100 replica boards I've seen so far do not include the really juicy things like layouts or component lists so you can build your own. Now, there are a number of good sources here but for boards like the Altair's CPU board or a few of the other then common boards like the Dazzler there doesn't seem to be anything that exists outside of scanned PDF's and photographs.

simply put in my maximum price that I'm willing to pay in one bid, and let the others fight it out, or the snipers do what they will. Sometimes I win, but most of the time one of the crazies with too much money wins.
Click to expand...
That old saying doesn't mean squat these days. Snipers now are willing to take massive and very expensive risks to get their hands on something. If you keep that mindset you are going to lose. The only way to outdo them is simply be one and I'm sure most of us don't have the credit limits to do that.
 
Hi, New to this forum.
Way back in the late '70s and early '80s I worked at the Byte Shop computer store here in the SF bay area.
I built all the various S100 computers and boards.
I have just restored a Sol 20 back to working condition, mainly restoring the keyboard with replacement foam pads.
It boots just fine and loads programs from tape.
I have a late DSDD Northstar floppy controller and the standalone drive, but no Dos boot floppy.
Does anyone have a Northstar boot disk for the Sol-20?
I have several boxes of hard sectored disks, so I can provide some blanks.
Thanks for your help.
 
Just noticed that there is another Sol-20 listed on Ebay.
It is listed as "Sol Terminal Computer"
Rust pits on the case, no photos of the inside.
 
Ok, found the info I need to create a Northstar boot disk for the Sol-20 on the "Virtual Sector Generator for 5.25" Floppies Now Shipping" thread.
Will give it a try.
 
It's always really satisfying when someone finds the info you've created helpful. As many people who create online resources for our favourite hobby know, it's very hard to estimate how valuable that information is for other people.

Anyway, you can log in to neoncluster's FTP site, and download all the SOL 20 CP/M and N* disk images, both SVN and NSI files. Also the SVN to NSI (and visa versa) conversion tool from Jim Battle, and Corey's awesome patched NST stub for the SOL (NST itself is available from Dave's Dunfield's site). I'm not sure if Corey or Jim have a place to download their files, so I think the only place to get them is from my FTP.

Hope you get your SOL up and running with the help of these.

Phil

(n.b. I was playing with my SOL and my newly built VGS last night, and noticed that the famous TARG game on the CP/M disk images does not play well with CP/M. I have another version modified to work with CP/M, and I will upload the .ent file to the FTP page this evening...if I can remember)

UPDATE: TARG for CP/M uploaded now
 
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Nama said:
(n.b. I was playing with my SOL and my newly built VGS last night, and noticed that the famous TARG game on the CP/M disk images does not play well with CP/M. I have another version modified to work with CP/M, and I will upload the .ent file to the FTP page this evening...if I can remember)
Click to expand...

Below is a link to some CP/M disk images for the Sol-20 running a N* DD controller. The "SOLGAMES" disk has a number of popular Sol-20 games on it as .ENT files. The .ENT files can be launched from the CP/M command line using the RUNENT program that is on the disk. Even though the games can be launched from CP/M, the games themselves are the original code so they run correctly. Of course, this also means most games end up clobbering page zero and therefore require a cold boot (e.g., EX E800) to restart CP/M when done with the game.

http://deramp.com/downloads/index.php?dir=processor_technology%2Fsol-20%2Fsoftware%2Fnorthstar_dd_floppy%2Fdisk_images%2Fcpm%2F

The program RUNENT on the disk has been modified versus the original version:

1) Assume a default file extension of ".ENT"
2) Display only addresses as the .ENT file loads instead of the entire file (speeds up the load process)
3) Automatically set the run address to the first address in the .ENT file if the run address is not specified on the command line.

The PCGET utility is on the disk to make it easy to retrieve other games from a PC via the serial port.

The disk images can be written with Dave Dunfield's NST utility, or see PC2Flop for a bit simpler solution (http://deramp.com/downloads/index.php?dir=processor_technology%2Fsol-20%2Fsoftware%2Fnorthstar_dd_floppy%2Fdisk_image_transfer%2F

Mike
 
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