As I have spent the past year and a half working with Seequa hardware trying to get machines ready for exhibition purposes, I have found one glaringly painful issue with these machines: The lack of documentation has made most sitting ducks. Out of all of the Chameleon units I have procured, only two have worked successfully with minimal intervention on my part. With the Chameleons, I find bodge wires run on the bottom in different positions than the last one I worked on, and I am always fearing one of those will pop loose and I will never be able to figure out where it went. Dave Egli told me they would scope the board to find where the bodges need to go, but without schematics and a manual I would not know the first place to start. So that leads me to my first future plan:
I would love to have a drop in replacement for the original Chameleon logic board that is sturdier and better supported. This would more than likely mean more PCB layers to run the traces inside the thicker board, but keep the same footprints and layouts for ease of swapping parts over. Once this is prototyped and tested, I want to split the project in two seperate directions:
I think for those who have Chameleons that do not work (myself included), having a board to sell with upgraded GAL chips in place of the PAL chips would be best for helping preserve these machines. The purist in me would hate to see Chameleon boards be scrapped, but at the same time I think that for future proofing either designing a post that prevents the logic board from flexing in the case (I have tried and failed this too many times) or new boards is the best way to go. It would still be the same chips and basically the same Chameleon, just on a newer board with upgraded reproductions of the non-standard PALs.
Much like the PET and VIC projects floating around, I would love to design a hobbyist recreation of the Chameleon. Something that you can solder together on your bench from off the shelf parts that is able to do everything the Chameleon did but with drive emulation and more fault tolerance. I think what has helped people understand machines like the Apple I and the PET are these projects that aim to create these "new" versions of these computers, and I think a Re-Chameleon of sorts would help people learn about what the Chameleon was capable of.
This is more of a "me" thing I think. I hate putting Goteks in machines. It ruins the look! I want my machines on exhibition to do exactly what they did when they were new. That means, I want to take disks out and put disks in, and with the Chameleons I love showing the hotswap of the two disks for CP/M and DOS. However, as I slowly start to run out of new disks and getting less and less lucky with disk drives working, having a mounted hard disk would make my life so much easier. Since I do not think Seequa ever made an ISA expansion, I have no hope of using an OEM solution. However, with Seequa's demo at COMDEX for the Chameleon Plus being a Quadram Quadlink board attached via an external ISA port, I do believe there is a way to adapt the two expansion headers to an ISA standard. Once the pinout of those expansions headers is known, I want to design a PicoMEM HAT that mounts to those pins and is slimline enough to fit inside the case with no modifications. I have no use for the DAC header, just the hard drive emulation and possibly floppy images for the machines that I cannot get working drives in.