MrPix

Specifically talking about the ColecoVision trademarks that are currently active, they are listed below. They're held by Colecovision Holdings LLC, a holding company that owns these marks, and may or may not own any Coleco IP. If they claim to hold any Coleco IP, they have to prove chain of ownership at every step. Here is the trademark on the ColecoVision logo in color: Word Mark COLECOVISION Goods and Services IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: video game cartridges and cassettes; downloadable video game software; computer game software for use with personal computers, home video game consoles used with televisions and arcade-based video game consoles. FIRST USE: 20131001. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20131001 IC 028. US 022 023 038 050. G & S: Computer game consoles for use with an external display screen or monitor; Computer game joysticks; Game controllers for computer games; Hand held joy stick units for playing video games; Hand held units for playing electronic games; Hand held units for playing electronic games other than those adapted for use with an external display screen or monitor; Hand held units for playing video games other than those adapted for use with an external display screen or monitor; Hand-held games with liquid crystal displays; Hand-held units for playing electronic games for use with external display screen or monitor; Toy, namely, battery-powered computer game with LCD screen which features animation and sound effects; Video game consoles for use with an external display screen or monitor; Video game interactive hand held remote controls for playing electronic games; Video game machines for use with external display screen or monitor; Video game machines for use with televisions; Video output game machines for use with external display screen or monitor; Video output game machines for use with televisions. FIRST USE: 20131001. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20131001 This is strictly a work mark in stylized form. The same logo without color is NOT covered. Description of Mark The colors black, red, orange, yellow, green and blue are claimed as a feature of the mark. The mark consists of the wording "COLECOVISION" in stylized letters with black outlines and with the colors red, orange, yellow, green and blue appearing in the letters as gradients. Separately, there is a mark for "ColecoVision Flashback": Word Mark COLECOVISION FLASHBACK Goods and Services IC 028. US 022 023 038 050. G & S: Computer game consoles for use with an external display screen or monitor; Computer game joysticks; Game controllers for computer games; Hand held joy stick units for playing video games; Hand held units for playing electronic games; Hand held units for playing electronic games other than those adapted for use with an external display screen or monitor; Hand held units for playing video games other than those adapted for use with an external display screen or monitor; Hand-held games with liquid crystal displays; Hand-held units for playing electronic games for use with external display screen or monitor; Toy, namely, battery-powered computer game with LCD screen which features animation and sound effects; Video game consoles for use with an external display screen or monitor; Video game interactive hand held remote controls for playing electronic games; Video game machines for use with external display screen or monitor; Video game machines for use with televisions; Video output game machines for use with external display screen or monitor; Video output game machines for use with televisions. FIRST USE: 20140920. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20140920

Dinky King 3!!!

Optical trackballs are 1 chip or 2 chip. The 2 chip ones you can often get the X Y -X -Y signals. Trouble is, one model number will have many different innards...

USB keyboards that support PS/2 fall back to a PS/2 serial clocked data and clock line. The keyboard driver ship no longer uses USB protocol at all, and just implements vintage PS/2. The keyboard falls back to this mode any time power is applied but no USB requests are made within a few seconds. That said, if you have the trackball, it is converting quadrature to USB, and you have access to the quadrature signals. Someone with experience with small CPLDs or FPGAs would be able to do this in a few days. Personally, I'd throw a PSoC 5LP at it, and make it a bit more intelligent. As for the controller that is the heart of this thread, it looks like a very well conceived device being made as a limited run, so development costs get spread across very few users. Yes, prices are high for bespoke hardware. If you want it for $60 or $70, I'll do them for you but it will be a strong, reinforced and weighted plastic case, and microswitch buttons. It will work, and do the job, and look oh so pretty. But it would be cheap to the core. What they're building is not.

My target price for this complete unit is at most $80-90, including shipping and SD card. I am hoping for less, though. The expansion cards can be 2.2" wide by 2.6" high, with RA pins in two groups of three. Cards will have end gaskets (like PCI cards) to accomodate connectors, etc. The gaskets will be 0.49" wide by 2.85" high. The expansion backplane is in pairs, so H1/H5, H2/H6, etc. H1.1: ADAMnet H1.2: GND H1.3: /RESET H5.1: +5V H5.2: GND H5.3: 3V3 ADAMnet will be buffered, and 5V and 3V3 will be provided by an external power source, included.

I've been doing some basic work on my single board ADE Pro "Plus" implementation. ADAMnet comes in, is buffered, then passed to the ATmega2560 microcontroller. The signals are then passed on two four internal expansion ports in the enclosure. These will be for future expansions, and anything people hand me a schematic for, I will develop to fit in the same single enclosure. More on that below. On the front will be a display - 1602 if my arm is twisted, but otherwise a nice OLED or TFT display, and the usual buttons. I have temporarily provisioned two SD slots, because it would be easy to adapt the ADE code to support two drives. This would make copying files much easier, and remove the need to do it on a PC. However, if the ADE author opts to not implement that I can simply make the second slot a microSD slot, so adaptors are not required. The whole thing would go in a custom colored and printed case to 100% match the Adam. So, extra interface cards. The first I have in mind is a PS/2-USB keyboard card. Adam keyboards are in short supply and getting super expensive, so it might be nice to be able to use a nice tactile PC keyboard. PS/2 is much easier to implement than USB, but both are possible. It's just a matter of forking the ADE code, which already contains a full ADAMnet stack. As always, these designs would be fully open source. Below is a basic concept board, so I can work out desirable case dimensions, case height, etc. Feedback/questions invited.

Yes, or you could send it to me and I could do it for you. That way, if the ROM is bad too I could burn you an EPROM.

I'll work on a schematic that combines the RGB conversion and 1881 sync separator. From there I could use an AD725 to obtain clean color composite that is more immune to dot crawl, plus S-Video. I have an existing reference for the AD725 that I've applied before. Clean RGB, clean composite and S-Video should cover almost everyone's needs who doesn't have or want HDMI.

I’m making a new batch of those PCBs in about a month. If you’re still stuck drop me a PM and I’ll mail you one.

That is for the 9929A, which is the PAL version of the 9928A. I don't know how it applies to the NTSC version.

3.5” drives detect write protection optically from the switch in the corner. 5.25” from the notch in the side.

Hi folks, I have been active for a while, and recently started developing some new hardware for the Adam. Yeah, I know, there's a lot of dusty old threads on here with not much to show for it. The difference is I have a quite good track record of making results available for the long haul. I'm sitting on $30k of 5V TTL components here, and I love the machines I played on and used in my past. So, now it's the Adam's turn. I've done some development work, but I thought it would be nice to discuss things here while I wait for China to re-open. I've been working on combining many of the usually separate cards into a single multi-card aimed at slot 2. My current target spec in an "MIB4" card is... 2MB SRAM + header to add 2/4/8MB more - I also have vast VAST quantities of DRAM that is 4Mx4, but I am not confident the Adam could refresh 4K refresh DRAM - (but using 4Mbytes in two DRAM ICs would make a 12MB card not just cheap, but easy and small) + Serial, based around the 28L92 DUART - 2681 register similar - extended baud rates + 5V RS-232 level shifters using ADM208E. Both ports implemented. One port also placed through inverter and level shifted to 3.3v and connected to ESP32 on-board. + All ESP32 GPIO available EPROM slot + switches for 4/8/16/32K ROMs IDE/CF/SD adapter capability ?? parallel port ?? I plan to squeeze all of this onto a slot #2 card using SMD and a high degree of integration. It'll certainly be a 4-layer board. All my boards are open hardware, and I release the schematics and JEDECs/equations typically three to six months after initial release. Separately I will be re-implementing the open source ADE Pro SD project on a single board, as microcontroller boards are basically my bliss. Video is my special area of interest and I do plan to do something there too. I have obtained the open source RGB adaptor designed by Citrus3000psi, and plan to re-implement it in a way that makes more sense to me (their design is very good, I just would have reversed it). However, I am looking to implement either a console character device for CP/M, or a 2MB bitmap graphics VGA adapter that I would trop in the top 2MB of the paged memory map (which is why my expansions are planned to top out at 10MB)... So, those are my plans. They're not promises, and currently half the list is vaporware. That said, discussion and feedback is welcomed. Comments and, in particular, direct technical advice feed directly into my work, because it's hard to pick up a platform you've just used for playing games after 25 or more years and just "know the hardware" and the implications for the OS - and as we all know, the Adam uses a salty blend of 2.5 OS Sooooooo, let's dance!

Remember that output from the DUART is inverted serial, and gets inverted by the RS-232 line drivers to being "correct" again. As you skipped the line drivers, you need to invert your serial lines.

Thank you kindly, sir. You are a scholar and a gent.

That's why I was hoping to get the evolved circuit and not have to re-do all the trial and error work. My first goal is to incorporate it into a complete replacement PCB where I can do the full set-up and control all the variables. The RGB-out would be buffered, and also sent to a converter IC (AD725) for S-Video and a much cleaner color composite out. If I were to redo the board for fitting to the back of existing soldered components, I would design the board slightly differently, to minimize install-time errors. I have an oscilloscope. I have a full design and SMD production capability here. In the future we're moving into a low cost level shifter plus Pi Zero option to emulate the 9928, with scaled HDMI output straight from the Pi Zero frame buffer. This will likely be 1/2-1/3rd the cost of the F18A MKII solution. However, that's just in the planning stages and I want to lay out this video circuit next week. I'd hate to have to order a board, and reverse engineer the schematic, just to get an open source circuit. I'd rather ask for help and give credit!

Right, but I am trying to incorporate the circuit into a new PCB that replaces the Adam CPU/video board. I will reread the thread. I likely missed it as I read the whole thread at like 3am The circuit is quite simple. I will be happy to provide ongoing supplies of these to my own design, ready assembled, if there's any demand for them. Thanks folks!

I have been looking for the schematic of the board in the first post. I tried contacting the designer but no luck so far. It says it's open source... The schematic isn't on OSHpark either. I'd like to incorporate with attribution the circuit into the output stage of an Adam CPU board replacement in the future, so it has native RGB. Has anyone seen the schematic anywhere?

14 months later, I am doing a very similar project with the turbo board from the Adam. Would you be willing to share any of your schematics so I can include some of your clean-ups to, for example VDP RAM, quickly? Any help would be appreciated.

It's still useful. It provides an encryption engine and runs a TCP/IP stack for you. The Adam will never have the performance to do that, which rules out transparently using any encrypted sites. I have to think about the next 37 years Also, the physical socket can be provided iy you want to plug a cable in. 10/100 though. My current video chipset does VGA output, but it is possible to add HDMI or differential serial eventually - I'd prefer to do DVI over HDMI - same signals, no encryption, and solves the DVI licensing issue.

This is the most useful thread ever. Not only a ready made schematic, but also a thorough grounding in the Adam paging system. I'm developing a slot 2 multi-card that has memory, serial and WiFi. I am also likely to do a ridiculously HUGE 12MB DRAM card for slot 3 in the future, which would pair with a video card I am porting to the Adam, which would occupy the 15/16MB pages with 2MB of paged VRAM, plus a page just below that for register access. There will also be a single board SD interface, which is getting software support from Bill Hicks. All will be produced and made available by my "hobby business" that covers its costs.

How about a nice 2020 status update, Matthew?

It is important that the track lengths are consistent within each individual board, not just across the entire end to end connection. It doesn't look from these renders as if you've fallen into this trap, but I'm explicitly mentioning it, just in case you do! (For the uninitiated: with HDMI and similar high frequency or differential pair signals, the tracks need to be very evenly matched in electrical length and impedance. If the design is split across two boards, each board standalone must be 'straight' as you can never be sure they will be paired with each other, or that a future board layout might shift tracks on one side around. So you have to look at the totality of the whole system. If you split the differences across the two boards so they only matched each other, and you then put the DVI header on an OTHER board, everything would go out of alignment and you'd have all kinds of subtle signal quality issues. This SUCKS. Especially if you later do a MKIII board and want to use the same header and you have to remember where you put the allowances.)

Funny thing: I am released some new S-Video hardware for another platform in the coming month.

One exciting aspect of this specific hardware is that it's really, REALLY generic. It will go in almost any socket where a ULA was used and can be configured by FPGA programing to be almost any device. The limits are basically the power and ground pins, and if any pins are not GPIO but just GPI or GPO. This could replace the 8301 or 8302 in a Sinclair QL, a lot of video processing in the earlier Ataris or Commodores - all it takes is the right FPGA code to map pins and to decode the video correctly. Also, while the MSX market may be quite small here, it is quite large in Japan and other EMEA markets. Also, the UK/EU retro scenes are much more active and those guys (and gals) eat this stuff up. I think he would sell far more by also having an "unprogrammed" option and people can just read the datasheet, create and install the JEDEC of their choice, etc. He'd find a whole bunch of aftermarket uses for this device.

It doesn't matter who the manufacturer is - they're just contracted to do the assembly. The producer of the board - the company or individual who designs and sells it - is the party responsible for the HDMI licensing.