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Rom Board & Memory Map

A project log for Varian Vista-based Z80 Microcomputer

Turning a pile of old circuit boards into a working computer.

bubblewrapBubblewrap 11/28/2022 at 17:190 Comments

The ROM PCB seems to be split into three primary sections:

The left hand side consists of 16 8KB mask programmed ROMs, addressed via two 3-to-8 decoders. These are the system's paged ROMS.

The mid-section consists of 3 8KB mask programmed ROMs, permanently mapped into the address space. These are presumably the core OS.

The right hand side consists of 2 512B mask programmed ROMs serving as some kind of additional address decoding logic, and 2 2KB EPROMs. I have yet to work out where these two EPROMs sit in the address space visible to the CPU.

The memory map, thus far, appears to be as follows:

StartEndContents
00001FFFFixed ROM U18
20003FFFFixed ROM U26
40005FFFFixed ROM U38
60007FFFundefined
80009FFFPaged ROMs
A000BFFFundefined
C000FFFFCPU local RAM

I haven't looked at the RAM card yet, but I assume there will be a 3-to-8 decoder mapping that 64KB into 8KB pages in one of the two undefined spaces.

The paging latch on the ROM card sits at IO address 0110xxxxb. Rather than latching the data bus, it latches the lower four bits of the address.

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