By now you have become familiar with the Sorcerer and have begun exploring its software. You will also want to investigate the many available hardware options. We will mention a few of these, to give you an idea of what is available.
To keep your Sorcerer up to date in the ever changing world of microcomputers, Exidy offers an S-100 Expansion Unit. Over 300 manufacturers produce S-100 devices ranging from floppy disk units to music synthesizers to color graphics boards; these are all available to the Sorcerer through the Expansion Unit. Our S-100 unit plugs right into the Sorcerer's 50-pin edge connector. It has its own 12 amp power supply and a mother board with six slots (2 amps per slot). The units can be daisy-chained if more slots are needed.
The S-100 Expansion Unit will support devices which do Direct Memory Access (DMA). S-100 plug-in cards are assigned to blocks of memory addresses or to Z80 I/O ports by means of jumper pads or DIP switches built into the cards. The Expansion Unit bus control circuits allow you to assign an S-100 card to any block of addresses or I/O port not currently used by the Sorcerer.
The I/O Expansion Kit contains an S-100 interface card and a cable which attaches the card to the Sorcerer's 50-pin edge connector. The interface card has the same bus controllers and buffers as the Exidy S-100 Expansion Unit; it fits into any other S-100 mother board and allows the Sorcerer to control the bus.
This kit conains eight 16K RAMs -- enough to increase the Sorcerer's internal memory from 8K to 16K, or from 16K to 32K. To increase memory from 8K to 32K, two kits are needed.
Our dual disk unit has all the capacity of an 8-inch floppy in a 51/4 inch format. The drive is quad-density with 630,000 bytes on line, easily expandable to over a million bytes. Each drive has 77 tracks of 16 sectors, with 256 bytes per sector, for a total of 315K bytes per drive. Track-to-track positioning time is only 30 milliseconds, and the data transfer rate is 250,000 baud.
The Exidy Dual Disk Drive contains an S-100 controller card, cables, documentation, Disk Operating System software, an Extended Disk BASIC, and an Assembler.
The Exidy Line Printer prints five-by-seven dot matrix characters with a throughput of up to 90 lines per minute, in formats of 80 to 132 columns; vertical spacing is six lines per inch. Paper tractors on each side of the carriage provide positive feed. The printer takes a cartridge ribbon, so ribbon changes are clean and simple.
The Exidy EX-820 Graphics Printer prints graphics or standard ASCII characters on five-inch wide electrosensitive paper. Three character sizes (80, 40, and 20 columns) and three graphic resolutions (512, 256, and 128 dots) are software selectable. Software commands also shift the printer between the graphic and alphanumeric modes and between standard and reverse printing.
The graphics printer accepts serial or parallel data at 300 or 1200 baud (jumper selectable). Data cables are not included.