Category: Display Equipment

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Sam Coupe HDMI Interface

Some of you may be familiar with RGBtoHDMI project (https://github.com/hoglet67/RGBtoHDMI) Which uses a raspberry pi board to convert the RGB signals from old computers into a HDMI signal for modern TV’s.

It was originally designed for the BBC Micro but was then extended to include other computers such as the Spectrum and the Amiga.

I popped over to the GitHub one evening and posted a message to see if in theory, the project would work with the Sam Coupe. A couple of messages later and IanSB had already implemented theoretical Sam support into his fork of the project.

So my next step was to build up one of the 12bit boards and wire it up to the Sam to see if it worked. And it did!!

It all powered on first time and the picture quality was absolutely perfect. All I had to do was center the image on the screen.

Once I had proven it was going to work I then made a prototype of the interface board that would connect this up to Sam. I am planning on designing a proper PCB for this part now it is all tested.

I then knocked up a quick case design in Sketchup and printed it out on the 3D Printer to give it a slightly more professional look. I even fired up the Vinyl sign cutter to give it a Sam style logo 🙂

And there we have it. The worlds very first (As far as I know) Sam Coupe HDMI Interface! Once I have the PCBs made up I’m probably going to build up a few of these as there are a number of people interested. But I will be releasing all the files so anyone can construct their own as I don’t want to spend the rest of my life soldering boards and the SMD components on the RGBtoHDMI board are a bit fiddley. Hopefully, I will get a bit better at them the more I do 🙂

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Philips CM8833-ii

One of the issue with having all these computers is having a display screen to use them on. I don’t just want to collect computer, I want to be able to play on them, so every system I have is hooked up and usable.

Most of my devices go through OSSC’s and then plugged into modern TVs via HDMI. But since I built my new unit I figured I had space for an old CRT monitor for the CPC464 and Spectrum.

My original plan was to buy an Amstrad CTM640. But when the person I bought it off packaged it in a cardboard box with a single layer of bubble wrap, you can imagine how well that turned out!

Luckily a friend of mine from school still had this beauty sat up in his loft. So we dragged it out, tested it, and now it sits on my unit displaying the CPC and Speccy in glorious picture quality. It’s also a 15Khz display so should work fine with the Spectrum Lightgun.

I didn’t realise that this monitor also has built-in speakers so that has saved me a lot of hassle with the wiring. Now both computers just plug into a scart splitter and I can turn either computer on by voice using WiFi switches (I have tried to do this with all the systems so I don’t have to mess around with plug switches).

Needless to say, I am very happy with this purchase so thank you Shaun for keeping it in such good condition over all these years.

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3D Acceleration from 2002

My old Shuttle xPC Windows XP PC has needed a little more grunt for a while. The motherboard has an 8x AGP slot so my choice of cards was slightly limited. After a bit of research I found the best AGP 8x card available and then discovered they fetch £150+ on eBay. So i started reducing my specification until I found some cards for a reasonable price. However, even at that point I came across an issue which I haven’t had for a long time, the Shuttle xPC only has a 230w power supply and this was no where near enough for the higher end AGP cards of the time.

I eventually settled for this little beauty. The GeForce 4 MX440. With a staggering 64mb of RAM and both VGA and DVI ports it’s an amazing piece of hardware for £15. Well maybe not amazing but it runs the orignal GTA at a frame rate that is far too fast to be playable so I have to turn the frame limiter on.

This PC is never really going to be used as a gaming machine, but it’s nice that it can run the old classics of which some don’t work very nicely, or at all in Windows 10 on modern hardware. Time to run up some of those old talkie editions of point and click adventures like Simon the Sorcerer and Day of the Tentacle.

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Amiga 500 RGB HDMI

I have seen a few YouTube videos about this little device. It is an adapter board that plugs into the original Denise chip socket on the Amiga 500 and then has a raspberry pi zero connected into it. This then allows the Digital RGB signal directly from the Amiga to be output via the HDMI of the pi giving a pixel perfect digital output.

The actual RGBtoHDMI project was originally designed for the BBC Micro but has since been adapted to work with many other retro systems. The Amiga version requires an adapter board designed by C0pperdragon and can be found here.

The adapter boards are available for purchase but the waiting list is apparently quite long so I decided to get the bare PCBs ordered from JLPCB and ordered the components from various places and then built my own over the weekend. Suprisingly it worked first time!

The only issue with using it on an Amiga is that it doesn’t output the audio, so you either need to connect the audio up to an amp via phono cables or get a device to inject the phono audio into the HDMI signal. I have ordered one of these from China so will test it when it gets here to see how well that works.

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YouTube: C64 Component Video Mod

I have recently purchased and fitted a component video mod for the C64 from videogameperfection.com

I bought this as I got a second OSSC for the bedroom and then discovered that the C64 cannot do any sort of RGB output so it didn’t work.

After fitting this the image quality is now amazing. Never seen it so sharp.

This is the first of what I hope to be a series about modfying retro computers and consoles to get the most of them in modern times 🙂