I was starting to run out of shelf space for new toys, so I had a move around and cleared a new area in the lounge. Originally I considered buying some of the usual cube storage that everyone gets. But it was just the wrong shape/size and didn’t fit my needs.
So I busted out my “not to bad” DIY shelf making skills and constructed another shelving unit to hold a mixture of computers, consoles and some drawers for random retro stuff.
if you look carefuly you might spot some spoiler alerts for systems I have not yet added to the site! And you will also spot an ominous empty shelf crying out for something different to sit on it 😁
This allows you to plug up to three 8bit ISA cards into the PPC512. I built up the board with just one ISA slot to start with (There was only one available on eBay and I can’t find them for sale in the UK anywhere at the moment so have to wait for some to come from China).
My first experiment was to connect a Soundblaster sound card. This is possible thanks to the Unisound DOS driver which is a driver and config utility for Plug and Play sound card under DOS.
As you can hear in the video above, this worked perfectly. A much better gaming experience than the internal beeper 🙂
The next test was to plug in an external EGA Graphics card. Luckily the wiring for CGA is the same as EGA, so I didn’t have to change any cables. Also, the RGBtoHDMI board in my monitor already supports EGA. So all I had to do was flip a couple of DIP switches on the PPC512 to tell it to use an external video card and voila!
I now have 16 glorious colours on screen at the same time and my Lemmings are the right colour as opposed to their weird pink and cyan CGA versions.
I am really impressed with what I’m being able to get out of this 086 8Mhz PC with 512k of memory.
I now need to wait for the other ISA connectors to arrive so I can get both cards connected at once. In the meantime, I think I’m going to design a 3D printed case to hold the expansion board and the ISA cards securely in place.
I’ve had quite a lot of people interested in my mini CGA monitor build so have put together a build guide to show what components I used. I have also uploaded the 3D printable files so anyone with access to a 3D printer can build their own.
I do still need to complete the wiring diagram for one of the cables which I will do shortly, I just forgot to take a photo of it before I put everything back together!
Click the link below to find out more, or head over to the “Projects” section of my website.
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.
