This is yet another pretty unknown Transputer module. The silkscreen print says “PARADICO – beheer submodule – BOP 1990”. Well, beheer is Dutch for management, so it was the management submodule for… something.

I got myself 4 of those from my Transputer-Bro’ Mike and after a good year of lying in my cupboard it was overdue to do something with them.
Mike was kind enough to do the basic deciphering of all the traces, links and stuff, so it was basically just building & wireing a front- and back-plane to get them working.

This is how one PARADICO looks like:

Not everthing is readable here but it does the job because the PARADICO is a pretty standard Transputer design. More or less a huge TRAM. So nothing fancy about it:

• One T800-25 Transputer
• 4MB DRAM (4×256)
• Some PALs for the memory decoding
• Buffers for the links
• A 5MHz oscillator
• A fuse… just to be safe 😉
• Handy jumpers for LinkSpeed and CPUSpeed

IMHO this is actually quite a waste of space but in these days you have to take what you get, right? 😉

Ok, so I ordered 8 DIN41612 sockets and after a day worth of soldering “The Cube” was finished:

“The Cube? It’s not square at all!” you might say. Yes, true, but the specs are all nicely squared so here’s the proof. The Cube has: 2² Transputers running at 5² Mhz, each has its own 2²MB RAM. Voilà, a cube 😉
For the convenience of connecting the cube to more or less any other system, I’ve added a hex-inverter so notAnalyse, notReset & notError can be converted into their “positive” counterparts (in the upper left corner of the picture, next to 3 red jumpers).

This is the ispy output connected to the “Gerlach Card“:

Using 150 ispy 3.23 | mtest 3.22
# Part rate Link# [  Link0  Link1  Link2  Link3 ] RAM,cycle
0 T800d-24 240k 0 [   HOST    1:0    …    … ] 4K,1 1024K,3;
1 T800d-25 1.8M 0 [    0:1    2:0    3:0    4:0 ] 4K,1 4096K,4;
2 T800d-25 1.8M 0 [    1:1    …    …    … ] 4K,1 4096K,4;
3 T800d-24 1.8M 0 [    1:2    …    …    … ] 4K,1 4096K,4;
4 T800d-24 1.8M 0 [    1:3    …    …    … ] 4K,1 4096K,4;

And if you happen to stumble over a Pradico yourself, here’s the pinout of the front  DIN41612 connectors:

          X  A32 C32   X
        GND  A31 C31  GND
 UpNotError  A30 C30  DownNotError
 UpNotAnaly  A29 C29  DownNotAnaly
 UpNotReset  A28 C28  DownNotError
        GND  A27 C27  GND
         X   A26 C26   X
   LinkOut0  A25 C25  LinkOut1
    LinkIn0  A24 C24  LinkIn1
        GND  A23 C23  GND
        GND  A22 C22  GND
         X   A21 C21   X
   LinkOut2  A20 C20  LinkOut3
    LinkIn2  A19 C19  LinkIn3
        GND  A18 C18  GND
         X   A17 C17   X
        GND  A16 C16  VCC
        GND  A15 C15  VCC
         X   A14 C14   X
         X   A13 C13   X
         X   A12 C12   X

JP1:
1 LinkSpecial
2 Link0Special
3 Link123Special

JP2:
1 ProcSpeedSel0
2 ProcSpeedSel1
3 ProcSpeedSel2

Next up: The Cube moves into the Tower of Power… when other more important things are done.