Zyklus-MPS

(Written by David Perbal) As I said in the previous post, the 2.8” touchscreen is too small. And its resistive touch isn’t responsive enough.   On the picture below the top left one is the “old” 2.8” resistive touch display. So I had to test new capacitive touchscreens :  2.8″ 320*240 pixels, ratio 4:3 (bottom […]

(Written by David Perbal) When we started assembling our Zyklus clones, we realized how complex it would be to upgrade the hardware (based on a Z80) and the software written in assembly language.   Just take a look at the PCBs needed for the ReZyklus :     Especially since we couldn’t find the toolchain […]

Marcel’s buddy had some Acrylate display covers made that fit the front panel nicely. Since they were totally clear, I decided to see if I could black out the edges with Matte Black paint. This is the process and result: First, I masked the outsiude of  the  viewport on the frontside: Using this, I could […]

Well, here it is, the open source release for the Zyklus clone: https://github.com/jeroenhn/zykl Thanks so much to Pete and Bill for allowing this project to go this far. Now go ahead and make your own!

Direct’s orignal powersupply was probably something thrown together in haste. No PCB, it had regulators and capactitors soldered together and initially when I was rebuilding the machine, I had to rebuild that as well. It always felt a bit hairy and when I noticed a lose solder joint recently I figured it was time to […]

Now that the machine has been running on a (very slightly modified) version of 1.5, I figured it would be a good time to start thinking about fixing some small bugs or other annoyances and maybe add some features. In order to do so, I need an easy way to upload a new version to […]

In my quest to write a manual for Direct, I’ve been going through the code with a pair of tweezers, along with the machine trying stuff out. A lot of the functionality is pretty straight forward and I got it mapped out, but some pattern / sequence related stuff threw me for a loop. My […]

On the Zyklus MPS front, there’s a lot brewing as wel. In essence we could now release everything as open source, where people can build their own and run it on the old MPS-1 software. But wouldn’t it be nice to have the ReZyklus variant of the software? I managed to find a linker and […]

The winter is coming, long dark evenings ahead for many a new hobby project. For Direct, I have quite a few things lined up: Replace all tantalum caps Create a better solid power supply Get the MELCARDS working and create a MELCARD writer to connect to USB Write a manual Create a schematic of the […]

Most of the old Z80 assembly code has been ported to a more modern variant (z88dk-z80asm) – thanks to David for translating quite a lot of it. Now I can build new EPROMS and burn them, but the better and quicker way, I thought, would be using EPROM Emulators so I can upload the bin […]