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Building a Breadboard Microtronic

A project log for Microtronic Firmware ROM Archaeology

Where we excavate the firmware ROM of the 1981 Busch 2090 Microtronic Computer System from its mask-programmed TI TMS1600 Microcontroller

jason-jacquesJason Jacques 09/18/2024 at 09:230 Comments

Before Michael helpfully pointed me to a Microtronic on eBay, I'd been hunkered down trying to build my own from a picture of the schematic and a handful of ICs.

Here you can see a video of the first successful complete self-test.

It was this attempt to build a recreation that lead me to discover some errors in the ROM we had extracted.

The detailed story of how I got to this point is available on my website as Disassembling the Microtronic 2090.

The document covers a variety of Microtronic (dis)assembly topics:

I'm currently working on tidying up the emulator code for the TMS1600 that executes the ROM. So hopefully soon you too can have your own faithful recreation of the Busch Microtronic 2090!

- Jason

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