The Marion Systems MS68K Single Board Computer
First Posted April 11, 2011
Updated May 15, 2011

User Manual (online)
User Manual (html zipped)
User manual (pdf)

May 15, 2011

    Well, I have most of the work done on transcribing the user manual from printed into electronic form.  I still need to redraw the schematic.  This is for a few reasons.  Mostly, after scanning the one in the manual, which was not all that legible in the first place, it is almost totally illegible.  Also, by putting it into Orcad Format, it will make it easier if somebody might want to clone this board.  Still no word from Tom Oberheim.  This could mean a few things, like, he doesn't care, or, I still have not succesfully been able to contact him.  Who knows, he could be on an around the world tour for all I know.  Well, I will keep it posted until I am told otherwise.

May 6, 2011

    Well, I am forging ahead on getting the manual into electronic format.  I scanned all of the pages that have text on them with my Eyepal and converted them to ascii text.  I am  going through these pages and fixing up tables and creating new drawing.  This , of course, could introduce errors..  I am trying to be as careful as possible.  I am redrawing the schematics with Orcad 9.2, so not only will there be a nice drawing, but you can also get the orcad files if you wanted to make your own board.  The electronic version of the manual will be in HTML format.  It seems like Kompozer is just a heck of a lot easier to use than any of the word processors, plus it will be in a form that will post on the interrnet fairly nicely.

Tom Oberheim has a "new" website.  It would seem that he is still keeping busy.  I used the email address I found here to attempt to contact him, but so far, no response.  So, is the MS68K abandon ware?


May 2, 2011

Hope springs eternal.  I have found the manual for the MS68K.  I have scanned it in using my Eyepal.  I have also discovered that this board was evidently created by non other than Tom Oberheim.  I am trying my best to contact him, but so far, I have not been able to find his company (SeaSound) on the Internet.  If anybody can help me in getting a hold of him, please contact me.  Now that I have the docs, I am planning on writing my own OS for the thing.

April 11, 2011

Many years ago I purchased this single board computer.  Much to my misfortune I have lost the documentation..  I thought it would be fun to mess around with this thing again, but because I don't know the addresses of the hardware peripherals, I cant do anything about it.

I am not really sure about the name of the thing.  The PC board does show MS68K on the board, and I seem to remember that the name of the company was Marion  Systems..

Here are some photos.





And here is a photo of the computer I built using this board....



So, in the last photo, you can see the two single sided 3.5 inch floppy drives, the MS68K board, and the home made power supply.  It ran a version of STARK DOS for the 68000.  Somewhere, I have those disks.  Recently, I downloaded the source for StarK dos.

If you happen to know who made the MS68K board, email me at patchell-AT-cox.net, you do know that you need to change the -AT- to an @ I hope.... :-)