ไม่สามารถเล่นวิดีโอนี้
ขออภัยในความไม่สะดวก
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 ส.ค. 2024
- I came across a project on hackaday.io called "Recreating the Jupiter Ace" and I decided to try to reproduce this myself. I downloaded the author's Kicad files, had the board fabbed up by jlcpcb, and built myself a 2024 Jupiter Ace! I ran into a couple problems, which I diagnose and resolve in the video. Then I designed three modules for it: 1) RAM expansion, 2) Raspberry Pi Supervisor, and 3) Speech Synthesizer. The Jupiter Ace is a cool vintage/retro computer because it is one of the very few computers that came with the FORTH language instead of BASIC in ROM. Not many people knew FORTH at the time, so this may have led to some of the marketing issues with the Jupiter Ace. Nevertheless, it is quite a capable computer for its size, and I even play a couple games -- Tut Tut by George Beckett and Moon Buggy by John Kennedy. For more vintage computer projects, see www.smbaker.com/.
Resources:
* Scott's Website: www.smbaker.com/
* Hackaday.io page on Recreating the Jupiter Ace: hackaday.io/pr...
* Tut Tut by George Beckett: www.zx81keyboa...
* Moon Buggy and other Games, by John Kennedy: github.com/Gra...
* Jupiter Ace Archive site: www.jupiter-ac...
Great to see. I was the designer of Big Mouth back in the 80's, and also wrote Snake for the Ace.
Please to meet you! I'm going to have to find Snake and try it out too.
As 'the guy who designed this' I was very surprised to suddenly find this video. Great work, and nice to see you spent way more time with the finished unit than I ever did. But I suppose I'll have to build a RAM extension and RPi board now.
I left some additional comments on my Hackaday page.
Cees! It's great to meet you! Thanks again for this project, it was a fun build, and also practical (at least for the time). I was surprised at the quality of some of the games that were written for it.
@@smbakeryt Yep, the programmers at the time really got a lot out of this super-limited hardware. And I'll upgrade my schematic and board to include your additional inverters.
@@CeesMeijer Sounds great. If you have the space for it on the board, might not be a bad idea to make it jumperable whether to use the delayed or non-delayed WE signal. Just in case someone has some RAM that doesn't like the delay. (Maybe I'm being a bit over-cautious here...)
@@CeesMeijer What IS the purpose of the 555 and associated circuitry and would it be wise to include a PAL/NTSC jumper on Scott's modded PCB or just tell NTSC users to pull the 555?
@@CeesMeijer I was wondering if the updated Gerbers were available?
I remember a computer fair in Sweden around '83 or '84 where they had a Jupiter Ace connected to a slot car race track to demonstrate the power of Forth, allowing visitors to challenge the computer.
The speed and consistency of the computer controlled car was quite eerie to watch.
I can see why it didn't catch on but oddball challengers are always fun.
Nice work withthe Write delay and getting the modules built.. Looks like the Jupiter ace now has more H/W support than it's had for the last 40 years ..Keep it up
Happy and healthy New Year to all the wonderful people reading this content. I'm looking forward to more great content!
Wow... Amazing work on this!!! I have an original Jupiter Ace that I'd love to try these with.
it amazes me how little logic is needed to get these z80 systems together. I imagine you could fold all the TTL into a PAL or small CPLD and collapse the BoM down to just a few ICs. kudos to you for solving the hardware timing issue. I suspect older RAM chips took longer to sample(?) the address bus after the write signal, but the new ones assume a shorter setup time.
It would be fun to try a few more SRAM and see if I could find one that worked out of the box without needing the modifications. On most of my projects I do tend to fold logic into PLDs, either ATF16V8 or GAL22V10 devices, but it's also nice to see something like this where everything was laid out in pure 74XX series logic.
True, you could. But whats the fun in that ? When I created it I tried to stay as close as possible to the original design. Once you start 'upgrading' components you are not really re-creating this computer. And then you are just one step from simply emulating it on a single ESP32 board...
@@CeesMeijer I think RTL and Verliog development is pretty interesting. software emulation can be depending on the fidelity and form factor. If the ESP32 board had the same board-level I/O as the original and was fully SW and peripheral compatible, why not?
at what point does a reconstructed jupiter ace lose its "jupiterness"?
@@poofygoof
I think the point where it loses "jupiterness" is different for every retro-computer hobbyist. To be fair, I also shifted the point slightly by using 'modern' SRAM chips and a switching voltage regulator.
That’s exactly what the ZX81 did with its ULA 😊
Thanks for making this cool video and good to see Tut-tut running on another Ace-like system. Maybe I should add support for your speech module to the game. I've been developing on a Minstrel 4D, which is a modern day Ace compatible, from Tynemouth Software. It uses an RC2014 bus connector rather than the original Ace edge connector, but I don't think that will be a problem.
That would be very cool. There are some RC2014 bus speech synthesizers out there (including one I designed myself when I first got started with RC2014), so it seems like a talking Tut-tut could be a cross-platform possibility. I enjoyed Tut-tut, and have been meaning to go back and play through a few more levels. Quite a strategic game, really.
At first I was thinking I should avoid this project like the plague, but with your great detective work and simple engineering solution it looks like a worthwhile project.
It definitely is ;-) But if you really consider it, drop me a note and I'll first modify the schematic and Gerber files to include the modification with the additional inverters. That will at least increase you r chance of success.
This is great! Thanks for sharing (and using my Moon Buggy game)! I fancy building the Raspberry Pi system to interface with my own Ace. It would be very convenient!
I had never heard about that computer before, can remember the spectrum, the acorn archimedes and so on but never had heard about a Jupiter Ace but googled it.
You have been real busy on this one, super awesome job, thanks for sharing.
Like I said before, you are a Genius!
Terrific!
How odd this just came up was discussing similar concepts with a Z80 computer vendor recently, "reviving" the Jupiter ACE concept but with the weird memory map fixed in favor of a more straightforward memory map and upgrading the video capacity. I hope forth computers make a comeback soon, the FIG's seem to be dying but I really want this to live and would really wish I grew up with Forth rather than BASIC
Which Z80 computer vendor? The Minstrel 4th and Minstrel 4D are other options in this space, though with some modernizations. I was originally looking to build one of those, but I think I ran into shipping issues to the USA.
@@smbakeryt The guy behind Zeal-80, not sure if vendor is the right term, designer and seller? I am introducing Zeal-80 to the why and how of dual stack VM's and the power of Forth
I had a Jupiter Ace back in the day, having FORTH was really nice but the keyboard was a bit horrible to use... especially after being at college or round a friend's house and using a "real" keyboard. But still, "look Ma, no BASIC" was great.
It was a fairly trivial task to "jumble" the wires for ZX81 add-ons to make them work with the Ace... I had a 32K RAM expansion. But sadly, back then, my soldering skills stank and I never actually did it.
You mentioned you used Linux. I also use Linux and I'm having a difficult time getting WinCUPL to run (fighting a dwsbc32.ocx issue). What do you use to program your GAL's?
I generally use WinCUPL on Windows. I'm sort of a hybrid user -- almost all of my "real" programming is on Linux, but I use a Windows desktop as my portal (via SSH) into the Linux boxes that I work on. So it's natural for me to use windows to run WinCUPL, though harder to automate. An alternate would be Galasm, though I think the syntax was a little bit different.
Adding three extra inverters to the CE line sounds good from a delay point of view, but doesn't that INVERT the signal too? Surely two or four gates would be better?
If you look again, he’s actually using 4 inverters.
@@markcummings150 Sorry, you're right. I was struggling with the resolution to see clearly. I had 'seen' the three inserted after the one, rather than making a different signal.
Great video and cool expansions! I built one of these boards 3 years ago, also ran into a few issues getting it to work, my comments are on the hackaday page. (Used all 74LS logic ). I still have composite output issue, will see if removing the 555 timer will make a difference.
Removing the 555 timer solved my composite video issue! Now get nice stable text on my composite monitors :)