This repository strives to provide a historical snapshot, archive and description of the short lived Cypher Z80/68000 single board computer which was designed, built and sold by Motel Computers of Willowdale Ontario.
The curator of this repository purchased his board in July 1984 (without any hard disk controller) and may still have one of the only remaining fully functional and pimped-out systems currently running (refer to photo below). Related GitHub repositories will document his own hardware and software additions to this computer.
The photo above shows a Shugart 1610-3G SASI controller card attached to the Cypher machine via the curator's Cypher Expansion Board and its then-new SASI interface port. The SASI card is attached to a MiniScribe Winchester 3425 22MB hard disk (April 1986 manufacture) configured as two 11MB drives. There is also a 5-1/4" 80-track Mitsubishi 4853 floppy disk to read and write Semitech Pied-Piper diskettes. The hard disk was purchased on June 4 1986 for CDN$568 and the controller board for CDN$275 (in 1986 dollars, which is about 3x CPI).
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How to Boot CP/M-3 from the HxC Floppy Emulator on the Cypher Z80/68000 SBC
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Parallel I/O, SASI Controller and R-Bus Interfaces Expansion Board for the Cypher Z80/68k SBC
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Port Organizer and Break-Out Box Add-On for the Cypher Z80/68000 SBC
The following is the features as listed in their magazine product advertisements:
- A complete 68000 & Z80 single board computer system with Ultra High-Res graphics!!
- Runs CP/M-80 2.2, CP/M-80 3, CP/M-68k, comes with Cypher DOS, a RAM disk & 68000 Tiny Basic
- Tektronics 4010, ADM3A, ANSI and VT52 terminal emulation
- Dual 68000 and Z80 processors
- 1MB memory
- Double density floppy disk controller (5-1/4" or 8")
- DMA controller for fast image transfers to/from video memory
- Two RS232 serial ports (ZSIO)
- 24 bit address management for Z80
- Ultra high resolution graphics programmable up to 1024x1024 (NEC 7220, great for CAD systems!)
- Real time clock (for multitasking capability)
- Two channels of D/A and A/D, 12 bit resolution (Music! Robotics!)
- 16k to 64k boot EPROM
- 16k to 64k static RAM
- Programmable baud rate generator (8253)
- Parallel ASCII keyboard input
- Full 68000 expansion bus (60 pin header, buffered bus)
For the curator, he was particularly enamored by the inclusion of the 1kx1k onboard NEC graphics processor, the 1MB of DRAM (which could be used as a fast RAM disk) and the generally low cost to migrate to the then-new 68000 processor from his prior Z80 development usage. Being able to flip between a Z80 and 68000 processor was also a unique and interesting feature for its time.
Seeing that the computer was designed by two highly technical research people (David Hunter and Ian Cunningham), it was no wonder that the computer had such unique, high-end technical features for its time. Finding a "low cost" SBC in 1984 with dual processors, a NEC graphics controller chip and two channels of D/A and A/D was few and far between.
A 1984-1986 potted history of the computer is outlined in this separate document.
As a reference for other Cypher SBC owners, and for future historical context, this repository contains scanned copies of the author's own collection of related documentation about the machine, both from himself and from the various software distributions between 1984 through to 1987.