Bandersnatch hardware

[Rorthron]

Watching the excellent Nostalgia Nerd video about Imagine Software, I just saw the Bandersnatch expansion board prototype connected to what seems to be a Fuller Box:

Reading this post from @druellan made me wonder who designed and made the prototype Bandersnatch peripheral and who was to manufacture the final device when it got to market. It's possible the prototype was knocked up by someone at Imagine, and in light of the incompetence of Imagine management, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if they hadn't worked out manufacturing. However, they may also have had a hardware partner, and that could have been Fuller. I base that not so much on the presence of the Fuller Box/Orator/Master Unit, which can be explained in many ways, but more on the fact that Fuller were based in Liverpool just around the corner from Imagine (a six-minute walk per Google maps).

Any thoughts?

✓ Reviewed

[druellan]

Oh, that's an interesting though! and yeah, I DO think the presence of the interface in the video is more than casual, specially because the prototype is connected to the interface pass-through, and Gibson is using the Fuller joystick interface to demo the prototype software.
Looks like product placement for a partner.

Even if we can't confirm this, the facts above and the fact of the close proximity of the Fuller offices, can be enough to place a note, perhaps someone knows something more.

[Rorthron]

There are other reasons for the presence of the Fuller gear, eg Fuller might just have given Imagine some freebies to persuade them to write games for them, Imagine could have just bought them, etc. There were, though, close (but not always cordial) relationships among the various Liverpool companies.

[druellan]

Found more information here: https://archive.org/details/Big_K_Issue ... ew=theater



Based on that article, Imagine was in talks with the company in Taiwan called PCI, to produce about 100.000 ROMS. It says ROMs, not UNITS, so it is not clear if we are talking about the internals or fully produced interfaces here.

EDIT: PCI Taiwan today, and assuming this is the same company, is listed as semiconductors and product manufacture company.
https://www.dnb.com/business-directory/ ... c8c18.html

[mjwilson]

Huh, I didn't know it was supposed to be 128K. (Or alternatively, I did know but I'd forgotten.) I was assuming it would be an extra 16K like Shadow of the Unicorn.

[druellan]

Huh, I didn't know it was supposed to be 128K. (Or alternatively, I did know but I'd forgotten.) I was assuming it would be an extra 16K like Shadow of the Unicorn.

Also, makes sense based on the image of the prototype, looks like it has 4 modules of 16k, so 64k in total to add to the Spectrum memory.

[1024MAK]

Something not quite right with that article.

If the game is 128K bytes, 64K bytes of ROM + 48K bytes of RAM (ignoring the amount used by the display) only adds up to 112K bytes.

And if you are going to the trouble of using bank switching and a large ROM, why not have ALL the game code in a ROM. Bonus, instant loading, no need for tapes.

A standard 48K ZX Spectrum can only have external memory mapped to the 16K bytes ROM area anyway, so bank switching is needed for more than 16K bytes regardless. Bank switching a 128K bytes ROM is not significantly different to bank switching 64K bytes of ROM.

Of course, as the article says, it costs lots of money to get masked ROM chips made. And back then, both 64K bytes and 128K bytes ROMs would have been expensive. The +2A, +2B, +3 and +3B all used two 32K bytes ROM chips.

The other possibility is that the 128K is a reference to 128K bits, NOT bytes (EPROM and ROM chips) are sometimes described with their capacity in bits, not bytes. A 128K ROM could actually mean a 16K byte ROM...

Mark

[1024MAK]

Post above edited...