Mike
In October 2025 I got an email from Mike. He told me that he had bought a Series 32000 demo kit around 1988 from Geoff Wood Electronics in Sydney Australia. He can't recall the exact price. But he felt that it was less than $200 AUD which was around $150 USD.
His demo kit is very similar to the "Designer Kit" described in the chapter Chips/Design Kits. He came across it recently whilst looking for something else and decided to see if he could do something with it some 37 or so years after he originally purchased the kit.
Because all the documentation was lost he needed some support. With the help of this website he was able to cobble together enough data to get something going. And this "something" is impressive - see it in the next Figure:
Fig. 1. The 4-layer PCB for the small computer system is not made for lowest cost: it uses gold finishing.
It is interesting to note that the NS32032 CPU of this design kit is a 10 MHz device. Normally design kits have slower (and cheaper) CPUs. The rest of the design kit are slower chips and therefore the system is running at 5 MHz. For the photo Mike took off the heat sink of the CPU.
The tiny chip in the upper left corner is the UART. The EPROMs are the original ones from the design kit and contain the monitor software TDS. The RAM memory is made of four CY62128E which are 128k x 8 chips in an SMD package.
The 20 pin DIP IC with the label is a simple address decoder. It is part of the kit. Mike had to do some reverse engineering on a breadboard to find out the logic function. In addition he runs the EPROM code through an emulator to see which addresses are used and which UART the TDS is using. The emulator can be found at Software/Emulator.
Mike is good in soldering tiny parts. The capacitors and resistors are all of the size 0603. I prefer larger ones...
One chip of his design kit is a big surprise to me: the NS32202 ICU uses a black lid. I have never seen before a Series 32000 chip using such a lid.
The next Figure shows that the system is running and Mike did a great job:
Fig. 2. The screen dump shows the register content of the CPU NS32032 (AR + AC), the MMU N32082 (AM) and the FPU N32081 (Af).
Mike used Kicad for this project. It is available on Github and you can find it here https://github.com/drelectro/ns32k-timewarp .
You have also a design kit laying around for years? Then follow the example of Mike 😊
Next chapter: Multiple Vendors