We recently acquired a NVIDIA Jetson nano developer's kit. It's a great, low power, single board computer with plenty of CPU and GPU performance. The default NVIDIA image is based on Ubuntu 18.04 which is not our favorite distribution. At GGLABS all our machines run debian and we started hacking at the nano to make fit our standards.
To continue the tradition we started a few year ago, GGLABS will be at the 2019 Bay Area Maker Faire. The faire will run from May 17th to May 19th. As usual Friday is dedicated to educators and makers while Saturday and Sunday are the general admission days. We will be showing the latest GGLABS creations including the GZ/80 Turbo Z-80 card and the A2SCSI card for apple II. If you plan to attend the faire feel free to stop by and say hi.
The Microsoft Softcard was the first card to allow CP/M software to run on the Apple II. It was originally developed to simplify the porting of Microsoft Basic to the Apple II. It turned out to be a great success and at some point in time it was the most popular CP/M platform in use.
This cartridge was originally developed to speed up the manufacturing diagnostic of our GRAM and GLINK232 products. Having to load the diagnostic for every board is pretty tedious and time consuming. The UNICART/D allows to have a custom ROM for both C64 and C128 while allowing to still plug in an additional cartridge.
The GGLABS T232 is very popular for debugging legacy RS-232 connections. In this article we will describe a few debugging tips and show how to emulate some of the common cable configurations.
Both the commodore 64 and the 128 have a software UART implementation that limits the useful speed to 2400 bauds. To work around this limitation Dr. Evil Labs and later CMD produced the SwiftLink232 and Turbo232 cartridges based on the 6551 ACIA chip. Both of these have been out of production for a very long time. GLINK232T is a modern replacement for the CMD Turbo232 allowing the commodore 64/128 to communicate at speeds up to 230400 bauds.
As 2018 just ended, our staff would like to wish all our customers, friends and suppliers a happy new year. We are very thankful for all the support we received so far and hope to continue in 2019.
In 2018 we shipped our products to 39 different countries. The most popular products were the RAMGS/8, the CGA2RGB and the T232.
GMT (GGLABS Memory Test) is a new developed memory test for vintage computers optimized for speed and coverage. The code is based on the test algorithms described in "Testing Semiconductor Memories: Theory and Practice" by A.J. van de Goor. The program is mostly in C plus small sections in assembly. It is free software and released under the GPL v3 license.
The geoRAM is a 512KB memory expansion for the Commodore 64 and 128 designed by Berkeley Softworks for use with GEOS. While not as fast as the Commodore REU due to its lack of DMA capabilities, it still provides a significant performance boost. GRAM/4D is a 4MB geoRAM compatible cartridge based on a two 4Mx4 DRAM devices.
The apple IIgs is the most advanced computer in the Apple II series. Equipped with a 65c816 8/16-bit CPU with 24-bit address space it could address up to 16MB of memory. The original rom 01 model shipped with 256KB of fast RAM, the revised rom 3 shipped with 1MB (both had an additional 128KB of standard RAM and 64KB of sound RAM). RAMGS is a newly designed 8MB expansion card for this great classic computer.