Aleste 520EX

[nocash]

> but cpcmaniaco should be the one to reply, not me.
Good to know. I sent him an email, hope it arrives.

News on the Aleste page, http://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/Aleste_520EX :

I've added the PPI registers. Moved the RAM Mapper to the "Gate Array 3" which is where it belongs to. And added a commented "disassembly" of translation proms/eproms, http://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/Aleste_Translation_PROMs_and_EPROMs

Looking at them, it seems some RAM banks can be mapped only to 4000..7FFF, so actually it seems to be more Inicron-compatible, than dk'tronics-compatible.

Another news is that there is now a http://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/Standard_Memory_Expansions page, there've dozens of articles referring to that standard, but none ever gave at least a hint how the standard works :-)

[deepfb]

I've edited, in english, the original interview I conducted to Valery for the Revista de Usuarios de Amstrad. Is there anybody interested in it? Should I post it here?

[nocash]

> I've edited, in english, the original interview I conducted to Valery
Yup, post it. Or upload it as .txt or maybe .htm file to cpcwiki.

Had a closer look at some pin-numbers. Unlike as listed on chipdir, the KR1802IR1 (24pin dual databus) doesn't seem to be exactly the same as the western AM29705 (28pin triple databus). So no idea if there's a western equivalent (?)

Some external connectors are also unclear, the schematics differ from the russian user manual.

Printer seems to be 7pin+7pin (not 7pin+5pin), that matches all photos and component map, according to the manual the extra pins are UCC (+5V), that info could be correct (the 5pin info is definetly wrong).

Joysticks are unclear, Up/Down might be exchanged with Fire1/Fire2. Did you ever connect a joystick?

Tape/Sound is unclear, too. The manual says only Sound is connected, and Tape pins are NC. Guess you never tried connecting a cassette recorder, or did you?

What else happened... broke the Aleste page to separate pages... and, added a note about the 2MB RAM expansion - any ideas how THAT works? The Aleste's internal RAM mapper can't handle 2MB, only max 1MB.

Oh, and the 66MB with new photos... that's too much (for me) to receive them per email. Best wait until your internet works again and you can upload them without using emails.

[deepfb]

The talk was held in English on an ICQ chat, on the 3rd of November, 2007. It has only been edited to put together similar answers and similar questions.
Text enclosed between square brackets was added by the interviewer.

Question: First of all, Valeriy, which was the reason to build a clone of the Amstrad CPC computer?

Answer: At that time there weren't open market shops where you could buy a computer. There was only one way to have one - to build it yourself. And all people was making ZX Spectrum clones, there were hundreds of variants ...but Specrum has limited graphic capabilities. On the other hand, MSX was very popular for education, but it was not possible to buy it, and VDP does not let to make clones [VDP refers to MSX's Video Display Processor, i.e. TMS9918]. So at one day we received a CPC, and found that it had better graphics than the ZX, and that it could be cloned.

Q: Did you receive a CPC from Patisonic?

A: No, it was at home. It's a strange story. One man gave a CPC 6128 to me and my friend. We just looked it and checked what was it.

Q: Where did this man get it from? Did he travel to the UK, or something?

A: The man was an engineer for a government company, he was repairing their phone communications. He was pushing the company to buy him something for his job. And when we met him, he had one Apple 2, one Amstrad CPC 6128, and one Atari ST.

Q: Was it a British CPC, or did it have a German keyboard...?

A: It was a British CPC, it even had the Pound symbol instead the Dollar.

Q: And how did Patisonic decide to design that hybrid computer, half CPC, half MSX?

A: The reasons were 1) CPC's disk format was unlovely for us and we wanted to get rid of it, and 2) we loved MSX. You should understand that MSX were like a dream. It was at the school or at university, but not at home.

Q: But the MSX you had at school were not clones...

A: Right. Many people had dreamt about a MSX clone, but VDP does not let . There was a huge amount of MSX at Russia, but not at home. Probably Japan bought russian oil and payed with MSX .

Q: Which was the most common model of MSX computers there? Did you have sofware for it, games...?

A: Yamaha, these: http://gameit.ru/2007/02/26/msx-yamaha-kuvt-i-metal-gear/. And we had a lot of tools and games. The Yamaha in the picture was the one for the pupils, we also had one Yamaha YIS-805 per class, for teachers. All the software was stored on disks. We had external FD controllers, and network cards also. I want to remark that MSX were seriously beloved computers at Russia. People made several excelent applications for MSX, like TOR, FIXER, DBG, NTOR...

Q: You say you had games... but you were not supposed to play games at school, isnt' it?

A: Hell, we played a lot. I remember my back was ill days after playing King's Valley II

Q: I agree, MSX is also my favourite 8-bit computer... only after the CPC :-D

A: You are right, CPC was good and MSX was also great. I love both, and each for different reasons. That is why we tried to make a hybrid . We wanted to make a 100% CPC compatible and move few things from MSX. By the way, there was also a ZX Spectrum with MSX Basic developed at Novosibirsk. But what I want to remark is that Aleste is a clone of the CPC, but not a MSX clone, because people sometimes get confused about it.

Q: Regarding the CPC, did you have software for it? production software? games?

A: Games, approximately fifty games. And CP/M, and software like DISK edit, DISK copy. CPC had great disk tools. The only problem was the disk format was not common in Russia.

Q: You were part of the team of developers of the Aleste...

A: Right.

Q: ...Did you develop your own software for the CPC?

A: No, I did not make any software for the CPC rather than the port of the MSX DISK ROM. I was happy with CPC games, many people preferred CPC games over ZX games. People was impressed by the effect when CPC changed the size of the screen in some games, as for Arkanoid and others.

Q: And how did you get Amstrad software? I suppose it was difficult...

A: There was a magazine, I guess it was called BYTEC. There were several subjects about CPC and its games. It was printed at Moscow. The address of the editor was available there, and we contacted with him. He told me that he often travelled to the UK and bought CPC games and software there. And he sold us all his stuff.

Q: Back to the Aleste, how many units were made?

A: I have no detailed info.

Q: The first Aleste units were sold in 1992-93...

A: Yes, we began designing it at 1991-1992, and prepairing to manufacture at 1992-1993. One year for computer design and other for all the stuff like the sound board, and also software. For example, PowerWriter text editor was designed during one year by one programmer.

Q: So there was special CPC software for the Aleste?? Is this software dumped to any digital format?

A: Yes, they are all on the site [http://aleste520.narod.ru/index.html]. You can download them, and convert them to CPC. But I'm still looking for some software. This is what we coded for Aleste: MSX ROM, MSX BIOS clone, boot loader and BIOS setup, text editor, debugger, disk fixer clone, text file converter, MAG STM player, pictures viewer, Norton Commander-like manager and ports of MSX games.

Q: I know the Aleste computer has a 3,5" disk drive, but I am unsure about which formats supports.

A: It supports CPC single side format, and it has a switch to change the side. It had also a position to set the disk as double sided. So as MSX it supports 360KB or 720KB disks, one or two sides, 80 tracks, 9 sectors FAT12.

Q: But MSX software had to be patched to work on Aleste, isn't it?

A: No. If the program doesn't directly call hardware, it will work well. Such things as archivers, compillers, command.com, msxdos.sys or VFY (disk verifier) worked without changes. When we adapted MSX DOS we took many command line tools from MSX DOS. The most difficult thing was rebuilding the MSX disk ROM because MSX uses different FD controller.

Q: And how did you loaded MSX cartridge dumps? (it was possible, if I am not wrong?)

A: Cartridges were not popular at Russia.

Q: But the games you had were cartridge dumps, isn't it? King's Valley is a cartridge game, and you had the game... I suppose you had a .bin file which was a dump of the EPROM of the cartridge, is it right?

A: Right, games were cartridge dumps. But we only got five or six games for MSX (and all of them were MSX 2 games), so we changed game's code. All this MSX games have a little BIOS at first 2KB and a little loader. We replaced both the BIOS and the loader by ours.

Q: According to Wikipedia, Omsk was a big city, with more than one million population. Was it common to have a computer at home, back then?

A: At that time there was many people, maybe one thousand for Omsk, who made themselves computers at home. Others would buy it, or live without computer.

Q: Was the Aleste sold outside Omsk, or outside the Republic in which Omsk is located?

A: It was sold in Omsk and in Tumen (Siberia), assembled or as a kit for hobbyists. Patisonic sold 30-50 units while I was working there.

Q: So it's not common even in Omsk...

A: Situation in Russia was not friendly for business. The schematics would spread among the public, and many people built the computer themselves at home. And in most cases, they bought a Spectrum because Aleste was more expensive. Anyway, few days ago I met a man who said that he built at home six Alestes;
this was a surprise for me, as I didn't know that there was people making a little production at home. Before I met him I thought that there were more Alestes assembled by Patisonic than home made...
Actually, Patisonic was not focused on Aleste; ZX sales were more important for the company, as it was cheaper, sold better and produced more money. But Aleste meant they had a good team of developers, it meant prestige. It was a good lure.

Q: When was the production ended?

A: I can't say for sure as I left the company before. I think it was in 1994, when Patisonic went to sale Dandy [Dandy was NES clone], Sega, and then PCs. Now they are just retailers.

Q: How much did the Aleste cost?

A: It is a difficult answer because of the hiper inflation at that time.

Q: ...and how expensive was it in relation to a salary?

A: It was almost the salary of a teacher. One month salary, I suppose :-D. It was hard to spent one month salary, but somebody did it.

Q: And Spectrum clones? Do you know their price?

A: It was three or four times cheaper. No disk, no 6845 [Valeriy refers to the CPC's CRTC], less roms, less RAM (64kb insted of 520kb) and so on.

Q: Did you have any software that made use of full memory?

A: Yes. First, Aleste supports RAM disk, you can adjust it's size by BIOS setup; you can even allocate the whole memory. So all developers' disks had a .bat file with copy dev. infrastructure to RAM disk. Second, MSX game emulation eats a lot of RAM. And MAG sound player uses all memory. Also PowerWriter text editor uses all memory for buffers.

Q: I don't want to be a nuisance, so I will only make a few more questions... Do you know of any Russian game developed for the CPC? Did the guy from Moscow, the one who was selling CPC software, ever delivered Russian software?

A: I do not know CPC developers other than the Aleste developers. That is because there was not so many CPCs in Russia. Regarding the guy from Moscow, he did not sell Russian software. I remember he moved for a job at Polaroid. He did good money and sold all CPC stuff, and then moved to PC.

Q: Finally, is it possible to find Russian clones of old western computers in Russia? If I were to buy an Aleste, would I have any chance travelling to Omsk and asking there?

A: I think it is easy to buy ZX clones, but Aleste... probably you can buy it in Omsk, but is so far, Omsk is Siberia. Moscow is absolutely different. One person contacted me half year ago. He wanted to buy Aleste for the same reason, just collect; I do not know whether he succeeded or not. I know only one person who have Aleste, a friend of mine, but it's broken or not finished. I do not know if he wants to sell it or not, but I know it doesn't work.
By the way, you did not ask about the sound board...

Q: That's true. I don't know too much about this sound card. I suppose it was far better than the sound IC in the MSX or the CPC machines...

A: Yes, it is Amiga's quality. Aleste has an expansion slot with 18 or 19 address lines, and supports DMA access. So the sound board has four DMA channels DAC. It plays STM files from Scream Tracker...

Q: ... it is similar to the .mod files for the PC that were very popular at that time...

A: Right, MOD is almost STM. In my opinion, the sound board is unique for 8 bits computers in 1993. Did you see the movie at youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-khEpzKJm2c)?

Q: Yes. It's a pity you don't own any real Aleste computer now...

A: That is the problem. That is why I made the hack for Caprice32, to run all this software and show the people how it was, I needed it. Do you know why I am doing it? Because two years ago I was at wiki and made a description about Aleste, because I thought this is wiki's goal. But nobody believed me and the description was deleted. I heard hundreds of things explaining that it was impossible, explaining me that I was wrong. It touch me. I will find MSX games for Aleste and I will close all impossible subjects.

Q: It's a praiseworthy purpose. It has been a very nice talk, Valeriy. Thank you very much. Spasibo, and do svidania!

A: Do svidaniya

[deepfb]

Joysticks are unclear, Up/Down might be exchanged with Fire1/Fire2. Did you ever connect a joystick?

Yes, I built a joystick adaptor, Aleste ==>> Atari -but I can't remember which was the pinout I took. It works fine with GX4000 pads :-)

Tape/Sound is unclear, too. The manual says only Sound is connected, and Tape pins are NC. Guess you never tried connecting a cassette recorder, or did you?

You're right, I didn't try it.

What else happened... broke the Aleste page to separate pages... and, added a note about the 2MB RAM expansion - any ideas how THAT works? The Aleste's internal RAM mapper can't handle 2MB, only max 1MB.

No idea, sorry...

Oh, and the 66MB with new photos... that's too much (for me) to receive them per email. Best wait until your internet works again and you can upload them without using emails.

Ok

[nocash]

> But nobody believed me and the description was deleted.
How cool :-)

[RockRiver]

What about Arnold Emulator ALESTE new version?           No$CPC Emu with this new CPC model?

In CaPriCe32 AlesteMod or Mess, How can I enter to Bios Configuration? Is needed a key combination, but I can't found it.

[mahlemiut]

Hold CLR during boot.

In MESS, the default key for CLR is Backspace (just to be confusing).

[arnoldemu]

What about Arnold Emulator ALESTE new version?

It is in progress.

[RockRiver]

Thanks mates. Now I can enter on both emus...
[note: CaPrice CLR key is pc DEL key]

Good Luck with Arnold, Kevin. Great work!!!

[Alessio]

> I've edited, in english, the original interview I conducted to Valery
Yup, post it. Or upload it as .txt or maybe .htm file to cpcwiki.

Had a closer look at some pin-numbers. Unlike as listed on chipdir, the KR1802IR1 (24pin dual databus) doesn't seem to be exactly the same as the western AM29705 (28pin triple databus). So no idea if there's a western equivalent (?)

Some external connectors are also unclear, the schematics differ from the russian user manual.

Printer seems to be 7pin+7pin (not 7pin+5pin), that matches all photos and component map, according to the manual the extra pins are UCC (+5V), that info could be correct (the 5pin info is definetly wrong).

Joysticks are unclear, Up/Down might be exchanged with Fire1/Fire2. Did you ever connect a joystick?

Tape/Sound is unclear, too. The manual says only Sound is connected, and Tape pins are NC. Guess you never tried connecting a cassette recorder, or did you?

What else happened... broke the Aleste page to separate pages... and, added a note about the 2MB RAM expansion - any ideas how THAT works? The Aleste's internal RAM mapper can't handle 2MB, only max 1MB.

Oh, and the 66MB with new photos... that's too much (for me) to receive them per email. Best wait until your internet works again and you can upload them without using emails.

http://130.89.161.206/stefan/chipdir/soviet/latin/data.htm

In this page I found a western versione (I suppose) of  KR1802IR1: should be a AM29705 as you supposed but I cannot understand PINs

[TotO]

Yes, I remember they are not using the same pinout by comparing the Aleste 520EX schematic and the AM29705 datasheet. Now, does the new mainboard footprint was modified for it or it is always for the original IC?

[Alessio]

Yes, I remember they are not using the same pinout by comparing the Aleste 520EX schematic and the AM29705 datasheet. Now, does the new mainboard footprint was modified for it or it is always for the original IC?

There's a guy who publish datasheet on his blog but was hidden for western people his latest revisions (2017) have still the same IC with same pinout.

I found russian datasheet for KR1802IR1 on http://ielekt.ru/datasheet/kr1802ir1.pdf, maybe could help trying to translate.
BTW I'm making a western revision of Aleste with kicad for printing it in China.