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• Flexible Disk Drive Controller (FDC) to coordinate the reading of and the
writing to one or
~wo
8-inch flexible disks
• Alarm and Music Sound Programming System, which enables you to select
alarm tones and generate music across two octaves, with selected tempos,
volumes, and tone characteristics
• Serial Communications Adapter, which is a Universal Synchronous/
Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter (USART), enabling the APC to
. communicate with almost any type of communications device.
The APC power supply is a 100-watt, 5-voltage-level switching regulator. It fur-
nishes dc levels to all components - except to the CRT which has its own power
unit - and has sufficient reserve capacity to handle future expansion. The power
supply has a software-controlled Power-Off control (POF) circuit that enables you
to turn off the system locally or remotely.
One or two 8-inch FDDs are integrated into the Main Unit. The FDC (NEC
pPD765) can read from or write to dual-sided double-density disks (which store up
to 1 MB of unformatted data) or single-sided single-density flexible disks (which can
store about 260 KB of unformatted data). The disk drive is a compact, high-
performance, energy-efficient design featuring direct drive by a dc motor. Head
loading and positioning is microprocessor-controlled for greater accuracy and
minimum wear and damage to the media surface. Variable Frequency Oscillation
(VFO) is employed to improve data transfer.
The APC comes equipped with a 12-inch (diagonal) green-phosphor monochrome
CRT or a 12-inch 8-color CRT. Either unit has a self-contained power supply. Both
have a reduced glare surface and a high resolution screen. Standard alphanumeric
characters are composed from an 8-by-19 dot matrix, allowing a display of25 lines
of80 characters. Special symbols can be designed by the user with a dot matrix of up
to 8-by-16.
The CRT Display has considerable versatility and provides you with capabilities for
scrolling, partitioning (and scrolling within selected partitions), overbar, vertical
bar, underscore, highlighting, blinking, and reverse video. The Color CRT Display
has all these attributes plus a choice from eight colors.
With the special-character generator, you can design up to 256 characters dot-by-
dot, which can be saved on disk as one or more special character sets. Using a dot
matrix printer, these special characters can be printed and displayed, making the
APC especially adaptable to users who use non-Roman alphabets or scientific
symbols.
Hardware Overview
1-3
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