Alphatronic PC
Introduction
The Alphatronic PC was manufactured by Triumph Adler/Royal. It was very popular in Germany. Some
units were sold in the UK most by a company called Matmos who re-badged it as the Matmos PC.
As standard the machine had serial(RS232) and centronics interfaces, could drive an RGB monitor (TTL) in 80
column mode or a TV via a modulator in 40 column mode. Basic was by Microsoft and held in ROM, and
an additional 16K of rom was available via a cartridge slot. The machine had 64K of RAM for user program storage. User programs could be saved and loaded from cassette.
An optional floppy disk drive allowed the running of Disk Basic or CP/M. The first additional floppy drive included the floppy disk controller. The second floppy disk drive was connected via a standard Shugart 34 Pin Interface and was powered from the first disk via a separate cable. Up to two further floppy disk could be connected using this interface, bringing the maximum number of floppy drives upto four.
The Alphatronic PC was sold in the UK under the name Matmos PC.
Documentation and Technical References
User Manuals
Technical Reference Manual
- Table of Contents
- Section 1 - General Description, System Configuration
- Section 2 - Disassembly, Assembly, Parts List
- Section 3 - Power on Sequence, Memory and IO Map
- Section 4 - ROMs and Jumper List, Monitor Commands
- Section 5 - Z80 CPU, Reset Circuit, RAS/CAS Timing
- Section 6 - RAS/CAS Timing, DMA Controller, Interrupt Controller, System Control Signals, Memory Selection, IO Selection, Buzzer, Keyboard, Baud Rate Generator
- Section 6b - CMT (Cassette) Interface, RS232 Interface, Parallel (Centronics) Interface, External Bus
- Section 7 - CRT Controller
- Section 8 - Circuit Diagrams
Software
- KEDIT.COM - Keyboard editor - changes the character codes generated by the Matmos PC
- CRT.COM - Enhanced CRT/Keyboard driver - uses hardware scroll to remove annoying flashing
- T-NET.COM - File server client using the RS232 port - connects to xbeaver file server.
- LEDIT.COM - Command line editor and recall utility.(Wordstar like controls)
- MFB.COM - Multi-Format bios, use with DISKDEF.COM to read foreign disk formats
- DISKDEF.COM - Disk definition utility for use with MFB.COM
- REVERSI.COM - The othello/reversi game
- IBM.COM - Program to read/write IBM (FAT12) File systems
- DISKED.COM - Low level disk editor
- TERM.COM - Terminal Emulator (VT52 etc)
- TALK.COM - Terminal Emulator (Native)
- RLOC.COM - Code relocator
- DSUB.COM - xsub replacement
- MEDIT.COM - Character and Screen Editor
- MASM.COM - Z80 Screen Editor and Assembler (Intel Opcodes)
Notes:-
- Binaries for the above are available in the matmos emulator pack and the high density software pack.
- The high density software pack will run with hardware modifications to the floppy disk controller on real hardware
- MFB.COM is different between the standard and high density versions.
- Source code for most of the above is available in the xbeaver source code archive
Hardware
- High Density Disk Modification
Emulation
The xbeaver emulator is capable of emulating the Alphatronic PC with the following limitations:-
- Interrupts are not supported - they are not used by the operating system and hence not an issue.
- ROMs are implemented as paged RAM. Writes incorrectly go to the rom and not the underlying ram.
Download the matmos emulator pack and expand it in your home directory.
To run the emulation type xbeaver matmos.cfg -o options. Options can be one or more of
- option B - Boot Basic
- option D - Use standard disktribution disks
- option F - Boot from disk
- option G - Use BiCom Roms with graphics card support
- option H - Use high density disk (3.5 inch 1.44 MByte CP/M format)
- option L - Use large disk (80 track 3.5 or 5.25 inch 640 kByte CP/M format)
- option N - Use CP/M network
- option R - Include Rom Packs
Shift+F12 cycles the monitor type through RGB, WHITE BAS, GREEN Analog, GREEN BAS
The emulation can be tweeked by modifying the configuration