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Bit3 Full View 80 (Under The Hood)


AtariGeezer

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A lot of people probably don't know what they're looking at, here...

 

There were a few VERY desirable, "Holy Grail" items, back then. This is one of them.

 

Off the top of my head, few others were the APROM EPROM burning cartridge, The Wedge, the Astra dual floppy drive, and the SWP ATR 8000 setup. Other than that, and to a lesser degree, having nothing but Rana or Indus GT drives. Setups like that were what dreams were made of.

 

In any case, this board was always super-unobtainable. It gives you a fast 80 column display, in hardware. I was lucky to pick one up a few years ago. I had always wanted it, as a kid.

 

The Amiga monitor will be an ugly black text on white background, & will cut the last line off, in the middle of the font. There may be an adjustment for this, inside the monitor. I think that most people ran it with an Amdek monitor. I always wanted to try it with an Apple IIc monitor, and a regular Apple II green screen, but haven't had the opportunity.

 

I'll open my Fullview 80 up and take some pics, perhaps it's a different revision. I noticed a jumper wire on the back of your card, not sure if mine has that.

 

Great that you were able to do the ROM dumps! Since the card uses EPROMs, it would be totally possible to make all new character sets for it. That would be awesome!

 

I really hope that one day this will be both emulated & reproduced. The Action! programming language fully supported this card, and it would be an amazing thing to have both available to modern day programmers, particularly since the last revision of the Action! source code was recently made available.

 

Good job, man, thanks!

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That's a nice 8021 based design, for sure. It is definitely a simpler design to manage on a card that size, than, say, a 6845 based design.

The LSI on the Bit3 is a SY6545 CRTC...

 

Found some other pics:

 

post-26874-0-37950200-1423440521_thumb.jpg

post-26874-0-01102600-1423440531_thumb.jpg

 

And some DataSheets:

 

CRT8021.pdf

sy6545.pdf

MB8128.pdf

Edited by AtariGeezer
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Thanks for posting this... I owned one of these briefly but let it go way to cheaply on eBay a few years back. Definite seller's remorse.

 

Now that my 800 has become my primary machine, a reproduction FullView 80 (Incognito compatible, of course) would be a very welcome addition to my system.

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I can't believe how rare these things actually are! Back in the day I got the impression that lots of power users were getting one of these (or the austin franklin)... but they seem less common than other exotic hardware for sure. I'd love to see a showdown between the Bit3, Austin Franklin and the XEP80 (wasnt there also an 80 column board from the omnimon folks?). I own the XEP80... pretty slow, but it does produce nice crisp characters on a green screen display.

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