Howard’s Blog

I bought an Altair 8800 Kit on eBay in late November. After receiving it on December 5th, I put it back in the box until Christmas. Well, today I opened it up again and started building it…

More details here: Altair 8800 Kit Blog

So far, it has been really fun.

I installed Windows Vista x64 on one of my test machines this past weekend. I am trying to decide if I can upgrade my everyday machine to Vista x64 and still run the programs I need.

After realizing that the ATI Radeon 9200 video card that I had in the machine was not up to the task of running vista in anything more than 1024×768 mode (which becomes tiring on a 24-inch monitor) I decided to buy a new nVidia GeForce 7600 GS video card. I chose this particular card because my motherboard does not have PCI-E on it, and I didn’t want to invest a lot of money into an AGP video card. It was reasonably priced, and after installing it, I can go to 1920×1200 resolution, and the system is a lot more usable now.

I installed Office 2007, and a few other Microsoft apps without any problems. Then I decided to try out the Zilog XTools USB Smart Cable. I kind of figured that this would not work, since I know it uses a proprietary driver, and I had doubts that Zilog had one ready for x64 Vista. I was right, it didn’t work. I filed a support request at Zilog, and so far, I haven’t received a response as to when/if the download cable will be supported under Vista x64. But luckily, the case has been “Escallated Internally.”

But, one bit of good news is that Zilog ZDS-II 4.10.1 for the eZ80-Acclaim! seems to work fine, at least for compiling and editing code. That’s a relief.

I also tried the Silicon Labs USB Debug Adapter, and the Silicon Labs IDE and they both worked fine. I figured that the Silicon Labs USB Debug Adapter would work fine since it is a USB Human Interface class device (HID), and Microsoft supplies the drivers for this class. I’m surprised that Zilog didn’t go the HID-route with their USB Smart Cable. I’ve made HID-class devices before, and it’s only slightly more work in the device-side firmware, and a lot less work on the PC side.

Entirely unrelated to this: yesterday, I received the AltairKit that I won on eBay last week, and I love it so far. I put some pictures up on my AltairKit page. Many thanks to Grant Stockley for putting this kit together.