!pr1
!lm12
!rm75
Some New Cards

1.  Bob Stout just called from Houston to renew his subscription to AAL, and to tell me about a new toy he's getting.  It seems that Legend Industries has a new kind of RAM card, containing 18K of static RAM, with battery backup.

16K of the memory on the card is mapped just like a language card, so it can be used in slot 0.  The card also has a hardware write-protect switch, that you can throw to completely protect the memory.  Once you have done that whatever you have stored in the card is there to stay.

The card can also be used in a higher slot for boot-up operation.  The other 2K of memory is mapped at $CN00 and $C800, just like the ROM on a standard peripheral card.  Think of the possibilities!

This new card from Legend is available with either NiCad or Lithium batteries.  This gives you a choice between rechargeability or very long power-off life (about 2 years).  The price is $149.95.

2.  Saturn Systems has introduced a card with 64K RAM and a 6502 on it.  The CPU runs at 3.6 MHz, compared to Apple's roughly 1 MHz.  Comes with a pre-boot disk to let you use this faster processor with Applesoft, Pascal, and Integer BASIC.  Price is $599.  See their ad in the latest Softalk Magazine.

3.  Analytical Engines, Inc. has one-upped the DTACK Grounded board.  For only $1550, you can plug in an 8 MHZ 68000 card with 128K RAM (expandable to 512K on the card!).  You can upgrade to a 12.5 MHz chip if you really need it.  DTACK is NOT grounded on this board, so you have access to the full 16-megabyte address space.  The 16K ROM on the board contains monitor functions and diagnostics.  YOu can replace the ROM with up to 64K of EPROM if you want.  Software?  The price includes a complete UCSD P-system (I think he said version 4.1) with Pascal, Basic, and Fortran compilers.  You also get an Applesoft-compatible BASIC interpreter that runs entirely inside the 68000.  CP/M-68 is optional, and Unix is supposed to be available soon.  See their ad in the latest Nibble Magazine.

4.  Lee Meador has designed a board with 64K RAM, 4K EPROM, and a 2MHz 6502 on it.  This unique board does not talk directly to the Apple bus; instead, there are two parallel ports (I presume implemented with a 6522 chip).  One 8-bit port talks to the Apple I/O bus, and the other is available to outside devices.  Software runs on the board at 2MHz, and at the same time your Apple chips do their 1MHz processing.  I can think of a lot of neat ways to use Lee's board, including as a printer buffer/controller, as a high-speed math processor, as a hard disk interface, and so on.  If enough of you are interested, Lee will sell these for around $500 each, along with some demonstration software.

