Products
The MicroEngine series of products was offered at various levels of integration:
- WD-9000 five chip microprocessor chip set
- WD-900 single board computer
- WD-90 packaged system
- SB-1600 MicroEngine single board computer
- ME-1600 Modular MicroEngine packaged system
The MicroEngine chipset was based on the MCP-1600 chipset which formed the basis of the DEC LSI-11 low-end minicomputer and the WD16 processor used by AlphaMicro (each using different microcode).
One of the well regarded systems was the S-100 bus based dual processor cards developed by Digicomp Research of Ithaca NY. These cards deserve an entry on their own, as they survived the demise of the WD single-board system and delivered reliable performance at up to 2.5Mhz. A typical configuration was a Digicomp dual processor board set, containing a Zilog Z80 and a bipolar memory mapper harnessed to a microengine chipset on the second board, linked by a direct cable. The sole configuration known to be still running in 2013 and documented on the web is described by Marcus Wigan, and contains 312kb of memory, RAM disc support through a modified Z80 BIOS (written by Tom Evans) taking advantage of the memory mapping chip on the Z80 board and using the UCSD Pascal III version if the operating system tuned specifically fir the awD chipset: once the Microengine had booted the ram-disc was available, and a software facility within UCSD Pascal allowed the system to copy the entire operating system to the ram disc and transfer control to it. This sped it up remarkably. This use of a Z80 BIOS to handle all the devices, allowed the use of a range of floppy discs, I/O boards and hard disk controllers .
The performance of this Microengine on a series of simply Interface Age benchmarks (originally designed for BASIC programs) is documented in an Australian Computer Society MICSIG paper presented at the National Conference on Microcomputer Software, Canberra, ACT presented on june 1982, along with a wide range of other contemporary machines and compilers, including Z80 systems supported by the 9511 APU chip hosted in the Digicomp S-100 Microengine system that he used.
Read more about this topic: Pascal Micro Engine
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