Modifications
Many Super-80 owners chose to modify their machines to address the limitations of the original machine.
The El Graphix kit added the ability to display lower case characters and "chunky" graphics.
The Printer Interface was an S-100 Bus card giving the Super-80 a Centronics parallel printer port.
The VDU Expansion Board (VDUEB) was an enhanced video display board for the Super-80 developed by Microcomputer Engineering (MCE). The VDUEB gave the Super-80 an 80×25 video display with limited graphics capabilities. It was based on a 6845 CRTC I.C. and had its own 2kB of video RAM and 2kB of character generator RAM. Installation of the VDUEB board was a one-way process, as it required major modifications to the Super-80 printed circuit board including cutting of tracks and soldering in many wire links between various parts of the board. The VDUEB was then connected via three I.C. sockets formerly occupied by the original video display circuitry. Removal of the original DMA based video display effectively doubled the performance of the computer, since the CPU was no longer being disabled 50 times per second for video display refreshes. The board gave the Super-80 similar video display capabilities to the Applied Technology Microbee computer, released about six months after the Super-80. This led to many Microbee games being ported to the VDUEB equipped Super-80. The VDUEB proved to be a popular modification, with a users' group forming for owners of VDUEB equipped computers - The "Super-80 VDUEB Users' Club".
The Universal Floppy Disk Controller (UFDC) was an add-on floppy disk interface developed by Microcomputer Engineering (MCE). The UFDC was based on the Western Digital WD2793 floppy disk controller chip and had a Z80 DMA controller on board. The most popular disk format was 5¼" (133 mm) 80 track, double sided, double density using a Mitsubishi floppy drive mechanism. This gave a formatted disk capacity of 800kB. The UFDC's use of DMA required the VDUEB upgrade to be present. To install the disk controller, the Z80 CPU was removed from the main computer board and installed on the UFDC board. The UFDC then piggybacked on the socket vacated by the CPU. This meant that in theory, the UFDC could be used with almost any Z80 based system, provided there was enough physical space above the CPU. The UFDC used a primitive track based disk operating system called "Super-80 DOS", however a CP/M BIOS later became available.
The MXB-1 Memory Expansion Board was designed by a member of the VDUEB Users' Club. The MXB-1 contained space for extra EPROMs, an optional battery backed real time clock, a centronics compatible printer interface and address decoding for up to 192kB of RAM. The extra RAM was installed by replacing the standard 4116 16k × 1 bit RAM chips with 4164 64k × 1 bit RAM chips. The CPU's 64kB address limit was worked around through bank switching. The MXB-1 was mostly of benefit to users running the CP/M disk operating system, since CP/M could then have a full 64kB of RAM for programs, with up to 128kB being used as a small RAM disk.
Read more about this topic: Dick Smith Super-80 Computer