Returning to CPCWiki

[Zetr0]

Hello my friends,

It has been a while since I was last here, sadly I had to cut back my presence within the communities due to health concerns.  As such I have left a couple of projects open that I would like to pick back up if others are interested.

Anyway, I do hope to catch up with the site

Z.

[Bryce]

Welcome back, and glad to hear that you have recovered from your health scare.

What projects are first in line?

Bryce.

[SyX]

Welcome back Zetr0 and is great read that you are better and ready for bringing more live to the cpc

[Zetr0]

well projects.... lots LOL

From CPC (full) PSU's to RGB Cables and the such like.  But what I really want to work on is getting cheap and easy mass-storage albeit IDE or SD Card for the CPC beauties =)

here is the latest adapter I have made for the Spectrum - its an update to an earlier version I made earlier in the year and plugs into the Z80 CPU port.


(isn't that pretty)


This version also includes a de-bounced circuit for the NMI header so a simple push to connect button can be installed =)




While difficult, It would be awesome to adapt these units. 

Interestingly all the clever stuff is actually in the ROM as far as the spectrum goes, the +2 (Black) and +3 have a 64K ROM that is paged in (page 7 I believe) - these machines have 128KB of RAM as well.  the Spectrum variant is only 16K, but there is a 32K version for the two 128k models (the Black 128k *toast rack* and the Grey 128k +2)

A shameless plug would be to say that I am selling a small few of these on AmiBay to fund the next project 

If any developer (looking at TFM / FS here ) would like one FREE to help be develop this for the CPC, then please just let me know =D

[andycadley]

Good to see you back (he says stealthily avoiding the fact I've barely had chance to visit the wiki in aeons!) and that looks like a neat little project. Theoretically adapting a ROM for the CPC should be easier, because the CPC was always designed to accommodate ROM extensions in a way the Spectrum really wasn't. I'd guess the key issue is how it's addressed and making sure that doesn't conflict with the existing address space usage.

[Gryzor]

Hello mate, glad to hear you're feeling better, welcome back!


This little project looks really lovely, let's cross fingers you can make some progress

[Zetr0]

Thank you for your support guys!

I shall start a project thread and include all the detail and as much code that I have.

Sadly I know very little about the inner working of the CPC 464/6128 machines, but since I now own both (CPC464 has the DD-1 + 3.5" FDD ) I am somewhat smitten by them =)

[TFM]

From CPC (full) PSU's to RGB Cables and the such like.  But what I really want to work on is getting cheap and easy mass-storage albeit IDE or SD Card for the CPC beauties =)

here is the latest adapter I have made for the Spectrum - its an update to an earlier version I made earlier in the year and plugs into the Z80 CPU port.

That should work in principle on CPC too. With one exception. The I/O must support full 16 Bit address decoding on CPC. (IMHO the speccy used 8 Bit I/O address space, right?)

If any developer (looking at TFM / FS here ) would like one FREE to help be develop this for the CPC, then please just let me know =D

Thanks' a lot, I really appreciate the offer. But I'm still in USA - away of my CPCs - so I don't need one now.
However I would like to help with the software. Let me know more about the details of the card. Maybe some CPC Emulator developper (Markus ;-)) can help here.

[Bryce]

I have one here. As soon as I have time I intend investigating what it would take for it to run on a CPC. Unfortunately, it looks like quite a bit would need to change But it's not impossible. The CPCs address decoding is a little bit more complicated than the Spectrums.

I have a Spectrum 128+ on its way to me, in which I intend to install it and test it fully Zetro has also kindly given me all the docs I need to understand it.

Bryce.

[TFM]

How much I/O address ports would it need to run in the CPC?
Do you already have an address space in mind?
I can provide help in finding ports, not used by any other CPC hardware if you like.

[Zetr0]

Thanks for the support guys, I know you have your own project, I really am humbled that you like this one - with a little luck and probably a lot of effort lol, we may get lucky.

I have started a project thread here on CPC

And before Christmas last year I redeveloped a 16bit IDE interface for the Spectrum -



its based on two HC573's , a HCT245, HC32, and a GAL 20VB - its been a while since I revisited this project so I will have to dig-up my notes =)

[TotO]

Nice. I have seen the "8-bit IDE" topic first, and answered with some questions.