Olivetti M20 Z8000 Computer: Upgrades and New Boards and Speech Synthesizers and ZORK!

I finally got my hands on an Olivetti M20 computer, this one came all the way from France! I've been looking for an M20 ever since I did the Z8000 clover computer project a few years ago. The Olivetti M20 computer seem to have been particularly popular in Europe, and were designed and manufactured in Italy. The typical M20 has two floppy drives, each either 320KB or 640KB in size. Some may have had optional hard drives. 128 KB of memory was stock, which could be raised to up to 512 KB by adding a total of three add-on memory cards. The CPU is the Zilog Z-8000 16-bit CPU. In this video, I upgrade the RAM from 128KB to 512KB, add a compactflash adapter, design a speech synthesizer, design a USB adapter, play zork and encounter a troll, try out the 8086 Alternate Processor Board (APB), and program things in Forth. For more vintage computer videos, see www.smbaker.com/

[@TooMuchMiddle]

Ahhh, nothing better than a Sunday morning with a coffee and Mister Baker.

[@justlostintime]

I worked for Olivette back when the m20 and derivatives first came out, we developed a teller system for a bank in Canada. We used the Zeus system for development. I Worked on the local network and sna network interfaces for the bank. It was a pretty good processor.

[@CheshireNoir]

I'm always so impressed with your ability to design and implement all these new boards for systems both new and old.

[@ingmarm8858]

My brother ran the ad campaign for Olivetti in Australia for these with Edward De Bono (from memory).

[@derekchristenson5711]

Very interesting! I've been thinking of building your "Clover Computer" some day, just to be able to use the Z8000 for something, as it is an interesting "dead end". Neat to see the M20 showing it in commercial use from back in the day.

[@TiBosRetroComputers]

I am very happy that you now also are a proud owner of this amazing Olivetti Computer. I have 3 of them myself featured on my channel. It is very nice to see all the new designed boards for the M20. As you said the M20 was widely used here in Europe. Especially in Germany and Denmark

[@smbakeryt]

I'll have to take a look at your channel. Have any interesting software or hardware in them?

[@zyghom]

man, you are a hero! I don't have such computer anymore but I remember on of my first "close meets" with PC was Olivetti 286 or so (if I am not mistaken) - beginning of 90 or so.

[@booboo699254]

For an obscure machine, that's a lot of new 3rd party projects! Well done

[@computeraidedworld1148]

What a pretty machine.

[@edgeeffect]

Z8000, Olivetti AND Forth ... this ticks so many of my boxes.... and it looks NICE too!
AZERTY keyboard's gonna be a bit weird to type on though!
Be cool to have a USB/Serial dongle on the indside... so it could have a USB port on the back... just for anachronistic fun.

[@lelandclayton5462]

I just realized you made Zork a multi-player game using a serial shell connection.

[@smbakeryt]

I hadn't really thought about it that way. It would still be limited to a single "player" with the console being shared. Mojozork (the Z-engine that I ported) does have a "multizork" feature built into it that offers a true multiplayer experience, where multiple players each have their own inventory and can wander about independently. That would be fun.

[@lelandclayton5462]

@@smbakeryt What I mean by two players is they control the single game but each player has a monitor and keyboard.
MultiZork sounds interesting. I'll have to look into that.

[@tubeDude48]

At 24:55, when I was running a Bulletin Board. I preferred ZMODEM. Yes, it's a matter of choice I understand. But it was faster then most.

[@smbakeryt]

Same here, and I considered porting zmodem as well (or as an alternate to xmodem) but I'm not sure I would realize the speed of it. Right now, I seem to be topped out on how fast I can pull bytes out of the serial buffer, and only using just over half of the capability of 19.2Kbps. There's also the matter of flow control, which I'm not sure I have working yet. Right now I set the serial buffers large enough (2048 bytes) to hold a whole xmodem-1K packet with plenty of room to spare. Zmodem, being windowed, I think would either need the flow control problem resolved, or a much larger buffer.

[@tubeDude48]

@@smbakeryt - I like all the switches that ZMODEM has, and you can control the Packet size. I always preferred it because of the speed and retries were very quick.

[@giacintoboccia9386]

Interestingly, Olivetti sold an 8086 board for the M20 as well as a Z8000 board for the M24 (their first PC compatible).

[@smbakeryt]

I'm been thinking of getting my hands on a M24 and building a Z8000 APB for it. I think the schematics are available (though the ROM images may take some research). I've not seen one of the Z8000 APBs for the M24 pop up on eBay or a similar site, but I do keep an eye out.

[@Paolo3480]

Hello, you said in the videos you put the gerbers of the Speech and the other board you did yourself on your github but I didn't find them.

[@pikadroo]

Atari pole position arcade used it… two of them if i recall correctly.
Hey, have you looked into the Z280 and Z380? As the name implies they are zilog versions of 386 and 286. They were even more of a fail than Z8000, none of these chips deserve their place in history. It’s a shame how they ended up.

[@smbakeryt]

Have not looked into the Z280 or Z380 yet. Maybe a future project! :D

[@douro20]

I wonder if it will run ZEUS? Or does it not have enough RAM? ZEUS is the UNIX variant Zilog designed for their System 8000 series of minicomputers.
If you want a challenging Z8000 restoration project try a Pole Position boardset- they have two Z8000s which are bootstrapped by a Z80 which also controls the sound- and like Galaga it has a dedicated microcontroller just for one sound!

[@smbakeryt]

Zeus might require the associated MMU. I think the S8000 computers had several MMUs on the boards. If we could get some info on Zeus, maybe we could even purpose-build our own compatible system.

[@GianmarioScotti]

Is there any chance you could publish the video cable pinout, so those less fortunate (who don't have the original monitor) could try to attach a PC monchrome monitor to the M20?

[@smbakeryt]

The technical manuals for the M20 are published on Chris Groessler's FTP site. There's also some details on video at www.z80ne.com/m20/index.php?argument=sections/hack/videocable/videocable.inc -- I think where you may run into issues is that the horizontal scanning frequency may not be standard and/or may not match the frequency of the IBM monitor. The 5150's monochrome monitor, for example, is well-known to have problems and potentially suffer damage when the freqencies are off. So be careful. :)

[@RetroFunPL]

Hey! This video is a great find for me. I got myself an M20 some time ago, but with no monitor. I still need to hack a connector together. Any tips for that? (At least whether the connector is anything standard)

[@RetroFunPL]

omg, I just reached the part with the VGA adapter, this sounds good

[@tubeDude48]

Do you plan on any more H-8 projects?

[@smbakeryt]

Yeah, as soon as a good new idea comes along!

[@tubeDude48]

@@smbakeryt - 👌

[@chaoticsystem2211]

that fan, isn't original, right? :D

[@DAVIDGREGORYKERR]

Take it out of an AMSTRAD PC1512