New Model Development Updates

[greg221b]

Hi Ewan,

That's great news about these microbees being ongoing products.
I had a couple more ideas about products:
- Printed manuals/books/etc for these babies;
- Built-in VGA and or HDMI output?

Hi Chesh,

Your design sounds very neat, would love to see pics.
I was wondering if it would be worth getting a batch of these cases made up to go with the microbees from somewhere like Acrilix Plastics?
I should look at prices first perhaps.

Greg

[MbeeTech]

Hi Ewan,

That's great news about these microbees being ongoing products.
I had a couple more ideas about products:
- Printed manuals/books/etc for these babies;
- Built-in VGA and or HDMI output?

Greg

- Printed manuals / books / etc. for these products
While it is nice to have a printed manual, I'd prefer to supply the manuals
in PDF format to save paper.  The end user can still print them out if they wish.

- Built in VGA and or HDMI output
HDMI compatible output is something on the to-do list.
If you have a look at the picture in this post you can see a gold mini-HDMI connector
on the new FPGA SoDimm module.  Once I get everything else going, I'll be looking at implementing
this as an output option.

[MbeeTech]

Another quick update on the Classic Plus Development :

Late last night I got the keyboard working using both keyboard scanning methods, however there is a timing issue that I still have
to sort out to tick it off. While the keyboard input is perfect under the machine language monitor, if I enter into terminal mode, occasionally
the keyboard returns the scan code for the key pressed + 1, ie, If I press the 'A' key, I occasionally get a 'B'.

I'm hoping that will be sorted quickly and then onto getting the Floppy booting. I have done some minor tests on the floppy drive interface
and it selects the drives o.k. and can step the head o.k. so I'll be checking the side select signal next and the Head Load Timing signal.

[MbeeTech]

Another update on the Classic-Plus.

Need to look into the keyboard problem further, but I suspect it might be an anomaly (bug) of the terminal mode in the Premium Plus
Machine language monitor.  I'll have to check if it behaves the same on a Premium Plus. Other than that, the keyboard works fine.

Classic Plus is Now booting from floppy. See below :



Still lots more to do, but all coming together quite nicely with the new FPGA SoDimm.

[MbeeTech]

Another little update on the Classic-Plus

Over the last couple of weeks I've been implementing the extended graphics functions in the FPGA.
This includes 4 bit plane graphics (like the Gamma), backward compatible with the Premium series banked PCG scheme.
It also includes some hardware 'acceleration helper' elements to speed up drawing to the screen and
horizontal scrolling (bit by bit, rather than character). Right now, I'm writing test software to prove out the functionality.
Once all the graphics functions are tested, I'll do a full write up here on the new video modes and the hardware helpers.

Aside from that, I've also proven out the Classic-Plus running at both 3.375Mhz ( Microbee normal CPU clock rate) and
10Mhz (Classic-Plus enhanced CPU speed). Running at 10Mhz it is quite zippy!

More to come.

[CheshireNoir]

Hopefully this will be available for purchase after my Tax Return comes in, so I can afford to buy one. :-)

Chesh

[MbeeTech]

Latest update on the Classic Plus development.

Over the last week I've been ironing out a few bugs
(hardware cursor positioning, cursor auto-repeat, videotex mod 1/2 dot clock screen mode etc)
and writing test software to prove out some of the new features.
I'm really pleased with the progress and glad to report that the new
4 bit plane graphics is working.  I've not tested all of it's capabilities as yet, but the design works
as anticipated to this point.

Here are a couple of teaser screen shots (not terribly exciting content wise, but they show the new
graphics working )






The image quality is not great as both pictures are just snaps with my phone of the output of the LCD monitor,
but you get the gist.

What the photos show is :
640 x 256 resolution
Regular font displayed in the foreground, while
the 4 bit plane graphics becomes background.
Foreground and background have different colour palettes (although for this test program
both the foreground and background palettes are programmed with the same colour sets)
The foreground has a single 16 colour palette while the background will have up to 16
sets of 16 colour palettes.  While using bit plane graphics mode, the normal 'Background'
colour (that gets written to colour ram) becomes an index to select which of the 16 background
colour palettes is in use for that character position and the value from the bit plane determines
which of the 16 colours from the selected palette get displayed for each pixel.

More pictures to come as I test the other graphics functions.

[ChickenMan]

Wow, looking good, cant wait

[CheshireNoir]

Saving up for this one :-D

Chesh

[RedskullDC]

Shut up and take my Money Ewan

Cheers,
Leslie A