Amiga Thread.


I finally got and fitted my new keycaps from https://www.a1200.net/

Here's a before, during and after... as a bonus they even gave me the choice of white or black arrow keys (there was also a full set of springs, and the little plastic hooks that the metal support brackets clip in to, as well as some smaller keys - space bar, shift, etc - which I believe would fit an A600).

Was hard to tell what it would look like when first backing (I did actually choose the black, white and transparent combination), and there was the choice of transparent keys, but I'm overall happy with the results :)

amiga-keyboard-3.jpg amiga-keyboard-2.jpg amiga-keyboard-1.jpg
 
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That's a surprising number of springs on the space bar. All the keyboards I've disassembled since the mid 90s have had the single spring (as part of the keyswitch), and then just the bar to keep the ends together.
 
Yes, I was a bit nervous about changing the space bar, and the springs are slightly different sizes. It's actually quite a nice keyboard that the Amiga has.
 
Yes, I was a bit nervous about changing the space bar, and the springs are slightly different sizes. It's actually quite a nice keyboard that the Amiga has.

i think cherry is the oem, right? maybe amiga had mitsumi ones too like all the c64 had?
i'm still a cherry user here too. love my g80-1800 with black switches.
 
That's pretty ace. I thought about how you could use a pi (zero) in a c64 cart as a co-processor, but my knowledge of the cartridge side of the c64 (and i guess the whole machine in general) is a little rusty these days
 
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That's pretty ace. I thought about how you could use a pi (zero) in a c64 cart as a co-processor, but my knowledge of the cartridge side of the c64 (and i guess the whole machine in general) is a little rusty these days
For almost all machines with an actual bona fide cartidge port, the port is just an extension to the system bus. 2^x lines will be address lines (read) and 2^y data lines (write) and left over lines are likely be be clock lines or other ephemera I've forgotten about. They're mostly designed for you to strap extra ROMs to, but can be abused as general interfaces if you can design an address layout to publish the results of your off-core computations to, and run something on the core to poll those addresses and pull the data off when ready.

Actually, if you're lucky or know a hell of a lot you might be able to master the bus by writing to the address lines and fidding with system ram directly from the cartridge port, but to do that reliably you'd probably need to know a lot about timings and the specific RAM chips that the video processor is accessing while the CPU is paused. Or run something on the 6502 that can signal it to pause when the coprocessor is ready to master the bus, and then you only have to worry about the video processor trying to run. Some buses will have buffers and other kinds of protection devices on the cart port that will stop that kind of hacking, but I doubt something like the C64 goes to that expense to be honest.
 
Well, carts must have access to the full bus, otherwise the super cpu and turbochameleon carts wouldn't function.

I was thinking that add the c64 powered on, the pi booted some sort of cpu emulator, and the c64 uploads a programme by writing data to a specific area of memory, the stone control registers let's you start and stop the pi execution

Does this Amiga board and the spectrum next need an sd card in the pi with software on? I presume it would need something similar...

Anyway, neat idea that i like, but I'll never get around to implementing my c64 idea.

Wonder when we'll see SNES and megadrive carts with pis in, working like everdrives. Could you imagine having roms to have net pay through the pi's wifi too... Lol
 
I ordered an 8MB expansion board for my A1200, but delivery seems to be taking a while. getting a little concerned, especially as I apparently had opted for standard shipping.
 
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I ordered an 8MB expansion board for my A1200, but delivery seems to be taking a while. getting a little concerned, especially as I apparently had opted for standard shipping.
Where did you order it from?, Just curious as I've had mix results from various Retro hardware shops.
 
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