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.
Welcome back, and glad to hear that you have recovered from your health scare.
What projects are first in line?
Bryce.
Welcome back Zetr0 and is great read that you are better and ready for bringing more live to the cpc ;)
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.
(http://s6.postimage.org/7if47o5o1/shoot_2.jpg) (http://s6.postimage.org/7if47o5o1/shoot_2.jpg)
(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 =)
(http://s6.postimage.org/d7n338uy9/shoot_3.jpg) (http://s6.postimage.org/d7n338uy9/shoot_3.jpg)
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 (http://www.amibay.com/showthread.php?t=34453) 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
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.
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 :)
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 =)
Quote from: Zetr0 on 00:16, 04 September 12
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?)
Quote from: Zetr0 on 00:16, 04 September 12
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.
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.
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.
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 (http://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/general-discussion/mass-storage-%28816-bit-ide%29-for-cpc4646128-project/)
And before Christmas last year I redeveloped a 16bit IDE interface for the Spectrum -
(http://s6.postimage.org/kt5632vu9/composite.png) (http://s6.postimage.org/kt5632vu9/composite.png)
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 =)
Nice. I have seen the "8-bit IDE" topic first, and answered with some questions. :D