Zyklus-MPS

Went to a local specialized paintsshop yesterday to have the colors scanned and mixed in machine grade paints. There will always be a color difference because the current paint is old and was subject to years of wear and stuff. But it will be better than rust. 🙂 Also included a high end primer, the […]

Thanks to Paul, who did the Zyklus boards as well, a new panel board is taking shape. I’ve been toying a bit with Kicad, but Paul is such a master in it, it takes me a day to do what he can do in a minute. With a pinch of luck, in about a week […]

Upon close inspection, the panel board suffered enough moisture damage to decide to scrap the board and create a new one. It’s not a complex board at all, thankfully. I started by removing all the switches so all the traces could be reviewed. During this process it became obvious that most switches have snuffed it […]

And I got to inspect it up close to see where we’re at. First I took a ton of close up pictures I can use for referencing wiring etc. Next up was to remove the mainboard. This yielded a surprise on the backside. Some kind of rubbery substance was splashed over the backside. I noticed […]

Here starts an important and cool restoration project. A lot has been said and written in the past about Vangelis custom “Direct” machine – as a result, this particular device has retained a certain ‘mystique’ on what exactly it did. We’ll probably never fully know for sure as some things like the most recent software […]

There is a little update, now that I’ve receieved one of the Most Amazing frontpanels created by Paul – and holy cow does it look good! He made one for himself compleet with wooden sides etc, and oh my…. I’m working on the Teensy version as well and mostly actually on the software, which is […]

So now that we have succesfully cloned the Zyklus with that learned a great deal on how it all works from a hardware perspective, it’s time to get deep with the code and try a new hardware platform. Obviously the Z80 is limited, which is why the code included some very handy bank switching to […]

The original Zyklus code was written in Z80 Assmebly, using a Macro assembler from 1985. Thanks to the current popularity of retro computing and the vast resources of the internet, I managed to obtain a copy of the assembler (though not the linker, although I’m fairly certain I have one from an earlier release that […]

After having new MCLZ8 boards created, this time with the components pre-populated (and thanks Paul for guiding me through the ordering process on that), I now have a working MCLZ8 emulator running. The emulator supports various modes, two of whcih are interesting for us: Mode 0, which means the emulator runs without acceleration, using external […]