5 Aug
2013
5 Aug
'13
4:59 p.m.
Honestly, I don't know much of anything about MSX.
You should! This is a **very nice** computer for mostly anything.
I'd reccomend you to take a look at something if you have time:
- BlueMSX emulator and its source code
- MSX Datapack (3 huge books in japanese, but some info and schematics
well detailed in English)
- MSX Techinical Handbook (you can find an excellent scanned copy at my
site:
http://www.tabalabs.com.br/msx/msx_tech_hb/)
Assuming we start with this as our baseline
configuration
1. N8VEM 8 slot active termination S-100 backplane
2. S100computers.com and N8VEM S-100 Z80 CPU board
3. S100computers.com and N8VEM S-100 VDP
Are any changes necessary to the above boards to provide MSX and/or MSX2
compatibility?
I need to study the schematic of the boards. I'm travelling for work
right now. I'll download them and take a look.
What else would be necessary to complete MSX and/or
MSX2 compatibility? I
assume some sort of S-100 board with 64K SRAM + IO. Probably a cartridge
port, couple 8255 PPIs for control and ASCII keyboard and a serial port
for
a mouse? Is there any sort of interrupt controller or DMA controller?
The MSX is way simpler than that. Basically (for MSX1 compatibility) you
needs:
- A Z80 processor clocked at 3.579545MHz
- A AY-3-8910 chip (sound processor, but also used for cassete input
[!])
- A 8255 PPI
- A TMS9128 (or compatible - you can use 9938 or 9958 processors since
they are a superset of the 9128) video processor chip
- At least 16K of RAM (preferably 64K)
- A little of glue logic :o)
Everything else is an expansion and MUST be glued to the expansion bus.
We can reuse the S-100 bus interface "glue"
from other boards. What I am
looking for is the components necessary for hardware compatibility.
Maybe, but what is the objective of the project?
- Create a MSX?
- Create an add-on board for MSX compatibility to an S-100 computer?
- Creating something new? :D
Greetings from Brazil :)