I was originally going to replace the green screen LCD on my PPC512 with a modern LCD colour screen. But there was nothing physically wrong with the built in monitor apart from the horrible motion blur. It seemed a shame to butcher a fully working device. So instead I opened up my CAD program and designed and built a mini “CRT” monitor for it. It holds an 8inch LCD panel and a RGBtoHDMI board for doing the CGA conversion. I will do a write up soon with instructions on how to build your own, including the 3D stl files to print your own.
Back at the end of 2020, a brand new Dizzy game was released for the ZX Spectrum named Wonderful Dizzy. The game itself was designed by the Oliver Twins like all the original Dizzy games. Then an elite team of programmers and artists got to work to make the game a reality. It truly is a Wonderful Dizzy game.
A short while back one of the Oliver Twins released some artwork for the tape inlay that people could download and print. This was most of the hard work done. But I also wanted the cassette tape to look like an original release.
I had an idea that laser etching the cassette tape on my mini CNC machine would achieve a similar result. After a bit of experimenting, I found that laser etching the cassette and then wiping over we acrlyic primer gave an almost perfect result.
So here we have it. Wonderful Dizzy, physical copy!
So if you have not heard of the MiSTer project (where have you been?) it is an open-source project that runs on top of the DE10 Nano FPGA board.
OK, so that probably doesn’t help you understand much about it. An FPGA is a Field Programmable Gate Array. What this means is it is basically a chip that you can re-program how it behaves. So imagine you have a Sega Megadrive, inside there are a bunch of chips and a processor that make the console work. With an FPGA and a lot of time, you can re-construct all of that hardware within the FPGA so it will now behave in the exact same way as the original hardware.
The main benefit of all this, is in theory, any core running on the MiSTer should be more accurate than software emulation.
For me however, the reason for buying one was that it looked fun to mess around with. Normally you need to buy the DE10 Nano and then buy a couple of additional parts such as extra memory, an I/O board and an analogue output board (if you want to connect it to a CRT for example).
Recently though, RMC Retro have announced their Mister Multisystem board. This board contains all the additional parts you need and combines them all into a console form factor. They have even designed a case for the unit that can be 3D printed https://rmcretro.store/all-products/
I have already pre-ordered my board which should arrive next month, so I will update you all once that arrives. Until that day though, I have been messing around with some of the basic cores on the MiSTer and also 3D printing the case ready for the new board.
Since the case design obviously took some inspiration from the PC Engine, I decided to stick to the same theme and went with a white colour case with a PC Engine style logo I designed and cut out using my vinyl sign-cutter.
I also have some white Playstation DualShock 3 controllers on their way along with some wireless USB adapters to link it all together. To finish it off I have a white wireless USB Keyboard with built-in trackpad. With that setup I should be able to play all of the MiSTer cores, both consoles and retro computer systems.
Last of my updates for today. Over the weekend I got around to finishing my home made Pacman Light. The base is 3D printed and contains a strip of ws2812 individually addressable LEDS. The Pac and ghosts have been etched and cut out of acrylic using my desktop CNC machine. Then all connected up to an ESP8266 board running the WLED software for control. It is now linked to Alexa to turn it on/off and currently I have Pacman lit of Yellow (not the orange in the piture), and the other ghosts are colour cycling in rainbow mode. I will see about uploading a video of this soon.
