I need help from anyone who happens to know the Bounty/Dilly board.
I have one in my posession and want to bring it to live again.
For those who do not know: its a D-Machine with Video ram on an ISA Bus board; the thing runs the D software (unchanged, I hope) and the PC makes a file server (and bootstraps it). The video memory is updated by the processor on the board and can be read out by the host.
I think, it was originally designed as a vga card replacement, which was taken over by Dilly.
Background Story:
I used to work for Siemens (Germany) in the late 80s to early 90s and my job was to develop X-Servers for accelerated graphics cards. One of those jobs was to integrate the bounty board and make the screen image transfer from the bounty into an X-Window as fast as possible. Ie. ignore the video output and present it instead inside a window of a bigger X-server screen.
I wrote drivers and visited a bunch of tech guys in the south of San Jose (don’t remember: LosGatos, ScottValley maybe), these where the guys doing the board…
Anyway the project worked and I still have some of that software on old tape drives, which I cannot read anymore…
So my question: is anyone out there who has any technical information on that board: i/o ports, ram address range, bootstrap procedure.
I remember that the communication was in a shared memory window, and that the board told the ISA Bus ranges of modified video memory to be read out (which was my job inside an Xserver extension I wrote).
Why am I interested in that: being a hard code Smalltalker, who wrote his own ST/X, I would love to see the old smalltalk-80 running on a D-machine. Not sure if the Dilly can do it, but - why not.
Best regards, and thanks. I will certainly provide more information if anyone is interested in the project. Any info even bits are welcome.
For all you nostalgic D-machine fans, here are a few photos of lilly:
A very interesting product. Some notes on your board
manufacture 1991
revision M
36 RAMs of 1Mbit x1
VGA BIOS from AWARD, 1990,
also Xicor X2804A 512kbyte EEPROM
marking of AWPI BOUNTY
has a 1989 “82C451 Integrated VGA Graphics Controller”
has a 113+MHz clock can
has 6 chips of bytewide 32kbyte 80ns SRAM
and 6 chips of bytewide 8kbyte 20ns SRAM
I’m only finding overview information online so far.
The Xerox “Dlily” or Bounty Board was an ISA card with a MESA (Star 6085 compatible) CPU on it. This was used for running ViewPoint / GlobalView on an IBM PC compatible under OS/2. Later PC versions used software emulation.
From Downgrade ezine, summer 2010, Russian language I think, page 20, article titled “Xerox computers: ahead of their time” starts at page 11:
And it gets even better. To emulate ViewPoint/GlobalView on a PC, Xerox engineers designed a special expansion card (the Xerox “Dilly” or Bounty Board) that carried an “Star” processor and was installed in the PC. In principle, this approach allowed the entire Pilot to be ported to the IBM PC, but in the end, only the shell was successfully ported. And even that (with the board!) only ran under the unpopular OS/2.
(Edit: this article, or something very like it, can also be found here, credited to Yuri Litvinenko, in a text website more amenable to translation than the above PDF)
I would recommend asking elsewhere too: perhaps classiccmp mail list, or maybe their Discord, or VCFed forums.
yes, a rare historic piece; I guess there are not many left of those on earth.
The 20ns RAMS are very likely to hold the microcode, the 80ns one’s the program memory.
If I remember correctly, 20ns ROMS were not available that time (or very expensive if at all).
uCode would likely come from an onboard ROM or loaded by the host.
I hope to find someone who knows about the microcode structure (I’ll contact Dan Ingalls - he might know). Well, before that, a big success would be to get the Mesa instruction set and its kernel to run - to be realistic.
Thanks for your reply, and in case you meet some “old” Xerox engineer, please tell him to contact me.
