ECS 4500 Tear Down

The design is quite neat, with the plastic chassis with drives and CRT lifting off the rest of the system, which is mounted on a steel baseplate.

There is a card cage at the rear with two special slots (Power Supply Board and Video and Deflection Board) and 6 general purpose slots with:

  • Processor card
  • Memory Card
  • I/O Card
  • Video Control Board
  • Floppy Disk Controller Board

The slots are arranged as two columns of 4 cards.

The video deflection card was missing from the second unit so that put restoration of that machine out of reach.

There are additional I/O adapter modules at the bottom of the unit on an inset fascia.

Also mounted on the baseplate are:

  • A transformer/terminal block for the linear power supply
  • Power switch
  • A 5V regulator on a heatsink
  • An anode voltage power supply for the CRT
  • A small speaker
  • Brightness control

The earthing approach looks solid.

The transformer appears to be in good condition.  It has a terminal block for setting the line voltage.  This was set to 220V, but I have moved it to 240V to make life a little easier for the power supply.  Perhaps there was a reason for pumping up the voltages, but the supply outputs look ok.

There is a power indicator for each supply on the backplane.

The +26V was a little high. 

The drives are Micropolis 1015-2 77 track units similar to the ones on my Exidy Sorcerer.

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