The KIM-5, a ROM Board produced by Commodore for the KIM-1 appeared. All experts thought this piece of hard- and software would have been lost forever. Not a single ROM dump could be found, neither had any collector the Hardware.
This changes a couple of weeks ago:
Many years I searched on the internet on fora, websites and friends in the retro world, it did not lead to a dump of the KIM-5 ROMs. It was even doubted the KIM-5 with Assembler/Editor was ever sold, despite the adverts in magazines of that period.
A couple of years ago I saw a listing on ebay.de of a.o. a KIM-5 and a KIM-3B board. I was too late, could not contact the seller or buyer, but I knew the KIM-5 did exist!
A year later Stefan Hamann approached me to ask for information on KIM-1 material he bought from ebay. He was the buyer! Stefan was so nice to lent me the KIM-5 (and KIM-3B) and the EPROMs he obtained. I have finally a KIM-5 in my hands with ROMs!
Hans Otten found the unfindable! The KIM-5 ROMS have been dumped, and are available on his brilliant site, as well as the manual, plenty of pictures and the disassembles sources.
Congratulations Hans!
Why the assembler was lost for so long can only be speculated: Even though it looked very neat, it had some nasty bugs. Please Read Eduardo Casinos Blog entry about the limitations: https://eduardocasino.es/posts/The-KIM-5-Resident-Assembler/
This was the last realy mystery of the KIM-1.
Remember, all this started with Ruud Baltissens effort in replacing the 6530 and Hans Ottens Collection of KIM-1 software and documents. It ended in uncountable KIM-1 Clones. This whole story is one of the reasons I still believe in mankind.
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