Getting an MTU-130 "Monomeg" board running

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I found this at the local ewaste recycler (eCyclers of Idaho in Idaho Falls, Idaho) and took it home since I was curious about it. I could find very little about the computer online other than it was some sort of "BS medical device". After a few quick fixes (blown fuse and a wiring issue), I powered the machine on to see what all it would do.... and it didnt do much. It started to seek on the floppy drive and the monitor showed garbage.

At this point, I decided to tear further in to the system. Inside, ther was a linear power supply, a monitor capable of displaying composite images, and two MTU boards. Doing a bit of searching on these two boards, I was able to determine that they came from an MTU-130 system. The main board is what MTU called "monomeg", it was a neat 6502 based board featuring 80kb of RAM. One interesting thing that I read, is that this board has some sort of extended 18bit address bus allowing up to 256K of address space.

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the boot ROM has been dumped
Eric Wright • 01/22/2015 at 06:07 • 0 comments

I was able to dump the 256 byte boot ROM tonight.
judging from a quick look, it appears it is talking with the 765 floppy controller ia $FFE8-$FFEF. I will look at the floppy controller board and see if i can figure out how they have it mapped.
http://content.thetechnickel.com/misc/mtu-130/MTU-130-floppy-boot-rom.bin
Some more info
Eric Wright • 01/17/2015 at 05:22 • 0 comments

Here is a little more information about the setup inside of the Accupath 1000:
There are three ROMs between the main board and floppy controller board. both of the ROMs on the main board are used as decoders (256x4, MMI6301) from what I can tell, while the ROM on the floppy drive controller (256x8) actually bootstraps the system.
During boot strap, nothing is show on the screen (they only have 256 bytes afterall) except the current RAM contents that the video system is using. The ROM seeks an image off of the floppy drive, loads it to RAM, and jumps to it. I will get this ROM dumped and disassembled soon.
The floppy disk drive is a Qume Qumetrak 542. After disassembling the ROM, I hope to be able to load some sort of monitor via floppy disk.

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Eric Wright wrote 03/13/2015 at 21:27

to Hacker404 and Starhawk: I would be more concerned about keeping the computer stock if it were in an MTU case, but AccuPath basically just put it in another case. I tried to get in touch with MTU a few months back, had someone get back to me saying they would look to see what they could find... i guess they didnt find anything as I never heard back.

I will say, keeping track of how everything connects has been a pain, there arent any identifiers on the boards as far as component location/number. hopefully i can get enough figured out to do some fun things with it :)

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Starhawk wrote 03/13/2015 at 21:07

Congrats on the front page mention! (Well, sorta, you made it into a The Hacklet post...)

http://hackaday.com/2015/03/13/hacklet-38-6502-projects/

Had a laugh when I looked up that MTU company -- they're out of Raleigh NC which is about an hour from my house. My father lives in Raleigh!

Good luck, have fun, and do interesting things :)

Oh yeah -- and I second Hacker404's request -- keep it as stock as you can. This really is a historical piece...

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Hacker404 wrote 03/13/2015 at 20:55

The hardware manual is here -

http://www.trailingedge.com/mtu130/MTU-130%20Hardware%20Manual.pdf

I can't find any pictures on this unit on the web (except yours). It looks like you have the last remaining unit.

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Hacker404 wrote 03/13/2015 at 20:44

Hi,

The manufacturer is here -

http://www.mtu.com/support/mtucomputers.htm

They have a forum where you could ask about a boot disk.

This unit must be very rare now. They might even be interested in this unit.

The boot os was called Channel Oriented Disk Operating System (CODOS)

I read some PDF's on it and it really was far ahead of it's time. It can even play back speech.

I am an old hand with this sort of tech so ask if you have a question. I will be in the projects followers list.

PS: This is really a piece of computing history. I am sure computer museums would be very interested. Please keep it 'standard'.

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Getting an MTU-130 "Monomeg" board running

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the boot ROM has been dumped

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