I have a book about MCS-48, MCS-51 and MCS-96. However I think it is not in English...

Hi @MS-BOSS thanks for the offer! German, French, Portuguese, Spanish. Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish or Danish would be just as good, but in the meantime I found an Indian engineer training script that covers MCS-96 bus interfaces. I'm now looking into building some kind of 16 bit RAM board that can be initialized from a modern µC (in the old days the name for that was "EPROM emulator") but with the twist that two way operation is possible. Possible other target processors are 8086 or 68000.

I found the book, but it is only in Czech and contains no info about the 8797.

Thanks, I guess that the Czech language is out of reach for me anyway  :-)

Maybe you could design a LCC to DIP68 breakout PCB and solder to the gold contacts? Wouldn't cost much if you have >= 5 chips.

That's what I had pondered. I 24.0mm square cut-out (maybe even "inversely castellated") might do the job. I'm also looking at some other options, since I'd like to make sure that code and chips work before "permanent soldering" of brittle LCC chips.

Did you encounter some chips? Having some retro fun? I see these chips are collectors items on eBay. Would be interesting when you get it working.

I've never worked with the MCS-96 family and I think I have only ever seen them on embedded controller boards, a laser printer in electronic scrap IIRC. Maybe I should have pulled the CPU to sell now, but I think it was soldered on.

I received a bunch of them - I can even send some your way. The LCC-68 package looks so 80s! The ceramics carrier is really brittle - to my regret I accidentally dropped one. Any ideas where to get an LCC-68 socket?

Yes, I'd like to get one working. In the meantime I found some "lecture notes" from India that contain bus configuration details. The 8bit bus interface is very similar to MCS-48 and MCS-51 and I wonder if I can use an STM8S chip for pre-loading RAM memory before handing it over to the 8797.

https://nptel.ac.in/content/storage2/courses/106108100/pdf/Lecture_Notes/LNm5.pdf

It looks very similar to the 8051. I guess the 96 is a hint that it has twice the word size of the 48. There is the usual ~EA pin to allow you to attach an external (E)EPROM. You could write small programs that use the internal RAM.

Is LCC compatible with PLCC? I found a few hits on LCC carriers on eBay but they were relatively expensive.

I think I'll pass on your kind offer. I have other retro stuff I'd like to try, including one TMS 70C02 MCU. But I'd be interested to follow your progress.

I had the same idea "twice a MCS-48" :-) The architecture is interesting, especially the register file and the "High Speed Output Unit" (this feature smells like gasoline).
Unfortunately LCC isn't compatible with PLCC (planar vs. lateral contacts).  Maybe I'll try something like this: #Gold186