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[Hardware] 3.3.1. What does the Lisa's Hardware consist of?
Almost all of the hardware inside the Lisa is easily user replaceable (the CRT + video card are the exceptions). It is also one of the first machines to support software controlled power on/off and floppy ejection. The Lisa is self contained except for a detached keyboard and mouse, with optional external peripherals (modems, external drives, printers.)
There are four common off-the-shelf Lisa configurations that were available from Apple dealers:
- Lisa 1 - two Twiggy drives
- Lisa 2 - single 400K 3.5" floppy drive
- Lisa 2/10 - single 400K 3.5" floppy drive, and internal 10 MB Widget hard drive and 1.8A power supply
- Macintosh XL - Same as the Lisa 2/10, with an optional screen modification kit for square pixels.
One or more external 5 MB or 10 MB ProFiles could also be added to any of the above.
Most Lisa configurations are unusable without a hard disk, so Lisa 1 and Lisa 2 units were typically sold with an external 5 MB ProFile (hence the Lisa 2 with ProFile is also known as a Lisa 2/5).
When MacWorks XL was introduced, it became possible to use a Lisa or Mac XL without a hard disk, so some units were sold without the ProFile.
Other combinations are possible since upgrades from Lisa1 to Lisa2's were offered as well as upgrades from Lisa2's to Mac XL's.
When Apple stopped selling the Lisa, much of the excess inventory was sold by Sun Remarketing in various configurations.
Due to the ambiguity about what a particular name represents (for example, a Macintosh XL may or may not have the internal 10 MB Widget depending on local conventions), some documents refer to an X/Lisa to indicate any of the above.
The Lisa family included the following hardware:
- Display
- 12" CRT black and white, crisp one bit display
- 720x364 or 608x432 (with square pixel screen modification kit ie. version 3A ROMS)
- 60 Hz Vertical Refresh
- Software controlled 64 levels of contrast (whole screen) - used as screen saver
- removable nylon anti-glare mesh screen
- external RCA video jack (duplicates the screen using a non-standard composite output signal)
- CPU Board
- M68000 CPU running at 5MHz
- Clean, orthogonal opcode set with access sizes for byte, word, and longs (8,16,32 bit values)
- 8 32 bit data registers
- 8 32 bit address registers
- 16 bit external data path
- 7 IRQ's
- User/Supervisor protected model
- 16 KB ROM with self-test and bootstrap routines
- Custom MMU built from discrete logic and RAM
- Support for 4 contexts for easy process switching, each up to 128 variable sized segments (512bytes-128K)
- Support for memory and stack use, and read only access segments
- RAM
- Two slots support Lisa specific memory boards with parity error detection (and optional soft-error correction, never implemented)
- Architecture supports up to 2MB of directly accessible physical memory
- It's possible to modify the CPU and memory boards to support up to 4MB, but this will work only with MacWorks
- Available memory boards
- Apple 512K (modifiable to 2MB)
- AST RamStak configurable for 512K, 1MB, 1.5MB, or 2MB
- Sun Remarketing configurable for 512K, 1MB, 1.5MB, or 2MB
- I/O Board
- Socket for optional math coprocessor AM9512 or WD2001 depending on I/O board version - never used
- Zilog 8530 Serial Communications Controller
- Two serial ports (RS232C 25 pin with optional hardware handshaking)
- Support for Async, BiSync, SDLC, HDLC
- Half/Full duplex, 38.4Kbps max under most conditions, except for AppleTalk (224Kbps) and 57.6 Kbps with MacWorks Plus II
- Parallel Port
- Provides connection to external ProFile hard drive, or a printer (ADMP, Daisy Wheel, Canon InkJet), but mostly used for hard drives. Not available on Lisa 2/10's as this connector is routed internally to the internal 10 MB Widget hard drive instead.
- Managed by VIA2 (6522 Versatile Interface Adapter)
- Sound
- One channel PWM square wave with volume control implemented by shift register and timer on VIA1 (Similar to the sound produced by Commodore Pet's, but much louder and with software controlled volume.)
- Used for beeps and clicks
- COP421 Microcontroller (Control Oriented Processor)
- Software Power On/Off and Alarm clock
- Real time clock (limited to 16 year range, base year controlled by the operating system)
- Keyboard and Mouse interface
- Keyboard
- 3 pin 1/4" Phone plug and coiled cord.
- shortcut pages pull-out under keyboard inside a special tray (Lisa1)
- multilingual accents
- n-key roll over with numeric pad
- auto-detection of keyboard language changes ROM messages
- Mouse
- Single button mechanical-optical mouse attached by a DE9 connector (also compatible with Mac 128, Mac 512, Mac 512KE and Mac Plus. Note that the mouse shipped with Lisas is physically different in appearance from these.)
- The Lisa Power Supply may be one of two versions, each with a North American and International variant
- Lisa 1/2 (original Apple version)
- North American variant rated 1.2 Amp at 120V 60 Hz
- International variant rated 0.7A at 220-240V~ 50 Hz
- Lisa 2/10 Mac XL "DataPower" version with increased capacity to support interal Widget 10MB hard drive
- North American variant rated 1.8 Amp at 120V 60 Hz
- International variant rated 1A at 220-240V~ 50 Hz
- The later, higher rated version is regarded as more durable, and can be switched between 120 and 220V operation via internal jumpers.
- Storage
- Floppy Media controlled by a dedicated 6504 CPU. The 2/10 uses an Integrated Woz Machine chip, the Lisa 1/2 uses a discrete component state-machine version of the Woz Machine.
- Dual 860K 5.25" Twiggy drives in Lisa 1 or
- Single 400K 3.5" SS/DD Sony floppy drive with software controlled eject, GCR multi-speed encoding
- Single 800K 3.5" DS/DD floppy drive (same as above but double sided) aftermarket upgrade available for use with MacWorks Plus/II
- Apple Hard Drive Storage
- External 5MB or 10MB ProFile hard drive with a Z8 CPU and error sparing
- Internal 10MB Widget drive in Lisa 2/10
- Third Party Hard Drive Storage
- Sun20 - 20MB parallel port drive installed internally in lieu of Widget. Also available in 30 and 40 MB.
- X/ProFile and IDEfile - modern replacements for ProFile drives using IDE drives or flash memory
- Priam card for use with Priam DataTower (86MB hard drive and 60 MB tape drive)
- SCSI card (for use with MacWorks Plus/ II)
- Three Lisa proprietary expansion slots. Known expansion cards:
- 2 Port Parallel Port Card - (common) for additional ProFile(s) or ADMP (Apple Dot Matrix Printer similar to ImageWriter)
- 3 Port Parallel Port Card - (very rare) similar to 2 port card
- 4 Port Serial Card - (rare) only usable with Xenix due to lack of drivers
- AppleNet Cards (very rare) - not released as a commercial product
- Test Cards (very rare) - used for manufacturing (only known cards that implement DMA transfers)
- SCSI Interface - (common) some have hard drives mounted on the card. Only used by MacWorks Plus/II
- Priam Card - (very rare) interface to Priam DataTower (86M hard drive and Archive Tape drive)
- LisaDAC Sound Card - (rare) - only used with MacWorks Plus to provide similar sound capabilities as a Mac Plus
- X/Lisa SCSI Accessories Card - (rare) aka LSAC, allows booting MacWorks Plus/II from a SCSI drive
- Other third party upgrades
- XLerator (12.5, 16 or 18 MHz 68000 with on-board zero wait state RAM, options: SCSI port and MC68881/2 FPU) performance upgrade for use with MacWorks XL 3.0 - MacWorks Plus II
- ROM switcher (facilitated installation of two sets of ROMs for quick configuration change between Lisa and MacXL)
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