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Ever wonder what the best op-amp in the world is? Wonder no more, it is the IC01 Ideal Operational Amplifier! Good luck buying one — they seem to be having some lead time issues.

Here’s another cloned card for your retro PC: may I present the MPU-IMC clone! (The what?)

It’s a clone of an old card that Roland made for interfacing PS/2 computers (MCA bus) with MIDI equipment like musical keyboards.

Files may be found at GitHub.

Don’t get too excited though because it’s not complete. Well, the board layout and schematic are fine, but there are two chips on the board that are special.

• The HD6801VD855P (Roland part number 15179222) is a mask-ROM microcontroller that runs the entire card. I’m not aware of anyone who’s dumped the ROM, but maybe now there is an incentive to do so. 😉
• The HG62E08R10FS (Roland part number 15239133) is a gate array device. Think of a CPLD but these were “programmed” by customizing the top layer of metal during the IC fabrication process. Roland calls it the “Handshake controller” but nothing is known about the internal logic. If someone sacrifices a card and decaps this chip, a simple image of the top metal should be enough to deduce the functionality. There are rumors this chip is used on other Roland cards, but I am hesitate to say they are identical. I suspect Roland had various versions of this chip with different logic depending on the card and the computer’s bus. More work needs to be done.

Anyway, I hope this is useful to someone out there!