amine Posted July 14 Posted July 14 (edited) The german IBM Legolines support different interface cards. Two are refererenced in the manual, the Lego card and the Nivo card. However 3 configuration files are present. Edited July 14 by amine Quote
amine Posted July 14 Posted July 14 32 minutes ago, evank said: What the heck is a Nivo card? I think they had at that time a government funding called the Nivo project were they collaborated with some manufacturers including Philips to equip the schools and universities. We had the same thing in france in the 80s Quote
evank Posted July 14 Posted July 14 Ah - pages 218-219 of the document at https://inria.hal.science/hal-01272196/document explain it nicely. I know there was something similar in England, and you're saying France too, so it must have been a European trend. There was nothing comparable in America, because our schools are run at the state and municipal level. Quote
evank Posted July 15 Posted July 15 Not mine, but check this out! https://www.instagram.com/reel/DaqA-vriIgB/?igsh=MTB0Y3YwczhtbDVjNA== Quote
amine Posted July 15 Posted July 15 (edited) 1 hour ago, evank said: Not mine, but check this out! https://www.instagram.com/reel/DaqA-vriIgB/?igsh=MTB0Y3YwczhtbDVjNA== In that case I prefer this https://youtu.be/BcIACHhslmo?is=Rj5VMZinItTErFuO Edited July 15 by amine Quote
evank Posted July 15 Posted July 15 No idea what I just watched :) .... I share that guy's mock computer because it is of the 8-bit era. Quote
amine Posted July 15 Posted July 15 (edited) 8 minutes ago, evank said: No idea what I just watched :) .... I share that guy's mock computer because it is of the 8-bit era. Generation mismatch...Starcraft game also in 8bit version Now I am really in trouble... Edited July 15 by amine Quote
amine Posted July 15 Posted July 15 On 7/14/2026 at 4:02 PM, evank said: Ah - pages 218-219 of the document at https://inria.hal.science/hal-01272196/document explain it nicely. I know there was something similar in England, and you're saying France too, so it must have been a European trend. There was nothing comparable in America, because our schools are run at the state and municipal level. Here is an interesting testimony of all kind of computers find in elementary schools in europe. https://www.msx.org/forum/msx-talk/general-discussion/the-computer-room-in-your-school Quote
Normann1974 Posted July 16 Posted July 16 Hello. I'm the guy behind the dubbekarl.dk blog. First of all, thank you for all the kind words about my work. :-) Someone mentioned an old Facebook post in this thread, and I believe that this was the lot I bought a couple of months ago. It was put up for sale in a Danish Facebook group, and no one seemed to be interested. I put in a decent bid and I got it. My childhood was all about LEGO and Commodore 64, and I have done quite a bit of work on archiving old, disappearing C64 material. So when I saw these products and couldn't find much about them on the Internet (I don't think even the Royal Danish Library has them), I just had to get them. I have scanned all content, documented the C64 cable and put it all up on my blog, and a guy in Copenhagen that I previously worked with on archiving offered to do the disk dumps for me. Although some bad blocks were detected on one of the C64 disks, the data should be intact. He's still working on the MS-DOS disk which seems to need a fair amount of cleaning before being readable again. The contents will be put up on my blog as soon as it's available. Let me also elaborate on what exactly is the situation about the people I'm talking to in my efforts to find the remaining products in this series. I am speaking to a guy that says his company worked on electronics products in collaboration with LEGO, not detailing which products exactly. He says he's struggling with memory, so I'm not convinced if we'll ever know the details. He told me that he once had a lot of stuff lying around from that time but that he donated most of it to someone. He promised to look around his remaining stuff and see if there was anything LEGO related that he could lend or give me for archival. Also, I contacted the persons that got the donations because I hope they might actually have some of the things we're looking for. I have not received any response yet. So to be precise: I hope to find more, but the chances may be slim. I will restart the communication with these people late in July or early August when I'm back from vacation. I'm really glad that people appriciate and are able to use the stuff. If you have anywhere to archive copies of this material (please note that the documents may be updated in the future, check the version numbers now and keep the original file names), feel free to do so as long as it's kept free and with some kind of credit (I suggest a link to the original blog posts). I'm not interested in anyone making money off material that I spent countless hours on archiving. Also, it's copyrighted. If you have any comments/feedback on my work, feel free to share them, preferably as comments on my blog as I may not read everything in here in the future. :-) Best wishes /Jan Quote
Toastie Posted July 16 Author Posted July 16 31 minutes ago, Normann1974 said: If you have any comments/feedback on my work, feel free to share them, preferably as comments on my blog as I may not read everything in here in the future. :-) Welcome to Eurobricks, Jan!!! We all certainly appreciate everything you did regarding your LEGO activities! Reading your blog was pure fun and caused a lot of excitement. Soon, there may be a subforum to Technic, which tries to focus and organize all the "LEGO Technic vintage electronics" threads and post here on EB. We may reach out to you, as we are also very much interested in how the different European countries were invoking computational activities in the classroom! Denmark's Regnecentralen RC 759 Piccoline computer is another example that was exciting to read/learn about. All the best and have a nice day Thorsten Quote
Normann1974 Posted July 16 Posted July 16 We had the Piccoline computer in both schools I attended (up to 1990), but we never had any of the LEGO stuff. We only had Comal 80 and a graphical programming language called "Myresnak". Quote
evank Posted July 16 Posted July 16 Welcome, @Normann1974. In case you're unaware: here is the impossible-to-find Lego/C64 cable (I have one ), here are the cable schematics, and here is where we archive documents and software. Quote
Normann1974 Posted July 16 Posted July 16 Yes, this cable was in the lot I bought along with its manual. It is me who added the photo on BrickLink. I also added the 9765 set, but approval times on BrickLink are ridiculously long (could take a year), so don't expect the set to be accepted into the catalog any time soon. https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?S=9765-1#T=S&O={"iconly":0} I also documented the cable here: https://www.dubbekarl.dk/blog/2026/05/14/lego-9765-interface-cable-for-commodore-64-128/ I have been contacted by one very interested buyer who insists very much to buy it. :-) Quote
evank Posted July 16 Posted July 16 Damn, I thought I was special for having that cable! Anyway as you've found, it is fairly easy to make one. Quote
Toastie Posted July 16 Author Posted July 16 2 hours ago, evank said: here are the cable schematics These schematics are still a bit too "complicated": You just need the (LEGO IntA) pin 3 to (Commodore port) contact 2 (+5V) and the pin5 to contact 1 (GND) connection for GND/5V, and then of course the 8 wires for the in/outputs, as shown in Jan's blog. On Jan's blog, even the pin 17 to contact 12 wire is not required for the cable to work, as pins 1+3 (+5V) and 5 through 19 (GND) on the IntA are internally all wired together; the same is the case for the GND contacts on the C64 port. I know that, because I made my C64 - IntA cable that way . Best Thorsten Quote
evank Posted July 16 Posted July 16 You may be right. I'm going to update my site to link to Jan's page ... @Normann1974 do you have any objection? Quote
Normann1974 Posted July 16 Posted July 16 Links and comments are always welcome. Spread the good word. :-) Quote
Toastie Posted July 16 Author Posted July 16 3 hours ago, evank said: You may be right. I'm going to update my site to link to Jan's page ... While we are at it We had discussed (was it last year? You, Dick, etc.) that there is a tiny little error in the schematics of 9750 as archived. This tiny erroe though cost me hours of thinking about how on earth can this thing work? It is on page 4, input circuit, top right: There are two resistors R? and R? (1.2kOhm, 56 Ohm), and one capacitor C8 (4.7 uF), which are all connected at the top; that's OK. But this connection trace has to go to +9V as well. I know it is just a little thing, but without, it can't work at all. Best Thorsten Quote
COPERNICON Posted July 17 Posted July 17 would it be possible to hook the 5v input of the interface A to an I/O pin of (for example) a FT232 or arduino, if the 5V is just needed for the logic µC's it maybe can be used to enable or disable the interface A via the PC, for example as an e-stop controlled by the PC...? Quote
Toastie Posted July 17 Author Posted July 17 57 minutes ago, COPERNICON said: would it be possible to hook the 5v input of the interface A to an I/O pin of (for example) a FT232 or arduino, if the 5V is just needed for the logic µC's it maybe can be used to enable or disable the interface A via the PC, for example as an e-stop controlled by the PC...? I think so, yes, that >could< work, but may need a little driver circuit (transistor): The +5V enable the 8 opto (6x in, 2x out) couplers (and nothing else) inside Interface A. The ULN2003 is just a Darlington transistor array. The max. sustained CE current of the BC557 (T1) used within Interface A for that purpose is 100mA. If I just use the 6x 560 Ohm resistors for the 6 inputs and the 2x 2.2kOhm for the outputs, I calculate less than 60 mA max. current, i.e., all LEDs in the opto couplers are "on". That should be the worst case, is however exceeding the max. sustained current, an Arduino output should deliver, which is 40 mA. So a BC557 wired as in the Interface A should definitely work. Maybe others know better though! Best Thorsten Quote
COPERNICON Posted July 17 Posted July 17 (edited) i see, it is a shame there is so much current flowing, it would have been cool if you could be using a standard FT232 or parallelport to switch on or off the interface A, ft232 boards have often a 5v pin (from the usb port i guess) so if you add a transistor to one of the data pins of a ft232 boards you can maybe switch the interface A on or off that way.... i think it is possible for a DB25/parallel port, in the article of lgauge.com about the interface A they used 2 control pins (1 and 14) for the 5v for the interface A, i dont know these pins can be controlled by the computer, it is also unclear what the current limit is of these specific pins i am considering getting a dirt cheap pcie to parallelport and serial port card for my PC, could be fun to control the interface A (with a custom cable) and an interface B ok, continuing on the DB25 port: Data register: controls pins 2–9 (DATA0–DATA7) => can only be set by PC Status register: reads inputs from pins 10–13 (and others) => can only be read by PC Control register: controls outputs on pins 1, 14, 16, 17 (and others) => can only be set by PC Edited July 17 by COPERNICON Quote
Toastie Posted July 17 Author Posted July 17 6 minutes ago, COPERNICON said: i see, it is a shame there is so much current flowing, it would have been cool if you could be using a standard FT232 or parallelport to switch on or off the interface A, Well it is a worst case thing. Actually, I would just try it out. A clone Arduino is really cheap; I don't know, but I'd guess it will work. If you want me to, I can measure the max current flowing - would take a day or so though. Best Thorsten Quote
COPERNICON Posted July 17 Posted July 17 (edited) 6 minutes ago, Toastie said: Well it is a worst case thing. Actually, I would just try it out. A clone Arduino is really cheap; I don't know, but I'd guess it will work. If you want me to, I can measure the max current flowing - would take a day or so though. Best Thorsten i have controlled an interface A with an arduino before :-) it is really fun thank you for wanting to help me out but i dont want to take your time, regardless, it is possible to drive a interface A with the 5v of a usb port, so if you can use that you will be safe it is such a big shame modern computers dont come with any usefull ports like DB25's or serial ports.... luckily cheap chinese adapter cards exist :/ final comment on the DB25 parallel port: the computer can set pins 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 14, 16, 17 and can only read from 10, 11, 12 and 13 thus (theoretically) you can drive 2!!! interface A's via 1!!! DB25 parallel port! Edited July 17 by COPERNICON Quote
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