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Expansion Bus Peripherals for Models III/4/4P?

NF6X

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I'm curious about what vintage peripherals were made for the models III, 4 and 4P that plugged into the bus expansion connector. There were the hard drives, of course, and also the Orchestra 90 if I'm not mistaken. Were there any others, whether from Radio Shack or third parties?
 
I found those Alpha Products peripherals myself just now while skimming through a random issue of 80 Micro on archive.org. Those color graphics adapters are new to me, and I'll look them up! Alpha Products also made a digital I/O device (Interfacer 80) and an analog input device (Analog 80). I found an IEEE-488 (GPIB/HPIB) interface by Scientific Engineering Laboratories, and a PROM programmer by Orion Instruments.

I'm interested in possible things to include in a peripheral emulation project, so I'd like to learn about what interesting peripherals existed. I think the VS-100 would be hard to emulate, but most of the other things listed so far are possibilities.
 
I see that both the Color-Graf and the CHROMAtrs were based on the TMS9981A. Were the two devices software-compatible, or did they interface to the computer differently? I'm interested in finding any technical documentation about those two hardware devices. Now I need to go figure out how hard it would be to emulate a TMS9981A in an FPGA... ;)
 
Bonjour,
For Newclock here http://www.prof-80.fr/newclock-m3-m4/prototype-newclock-80-m3-4
VS100 for his little sister will be available here http://www.prof-80.fr/vs-100-trs-80-m3
I am seeking information on the cards Color-Graf graphics adapter and CHOROMAtrs graphics adapter to build prototypes

If you want to emulate these cards
For Grafix card 4.2 http://www.prof-80.fr/grafix-4-2/graphix-4-2
For Grafix card 5.1 http://www.prof-80.fr/grafix-5-1/prototype-grafyx-5-1
For Grafix card 3.2 http://www.prof-80.fr/grafyx-3-2/prototype-grafyx-3-2
For Hires M3 http://www.prof-80.fr/kit-graphics-26-1125/compatible-kit-graphics-26-1125
For Hires M4 http://www.prof-80.fr/trs-80-m4-4p-kit-graphics-26-1126/carte-prototype-hi-res-m4-4p
For Orchestra 90 http://www.prof-80.fr/orchestra-90/prototype-orchestre90
.....etc
The schematics here http://www.prof-80.fr/download/category/12-schemas
Information for these cards are here:
http://www.prof-80.fr/
Pascal
 
Emulating a TMS9918A with an FPGA isn't very difficult as long as you don't want composite video output. I did it maybe 8 years ago with VGA, works great. Not much use for it, but it works great. I added some of the features from the later V9938/V9958 MSX video chips, such as the palette registers, just for fun. You need an external video DAC of some kind; I used a semi-vintage ADV7120 I think--not sure, it's been a long time. Suggest you shoot for 800x600 SVGA; it works out to have the right aspect ratio and border size. I've seen some less-than-thought-through implementations using 640x480 that have a stupid-wide border region.
 
Here's what you want. You won't really want to use the same timings presumably, because you'll want to bypass the limitation on the number of sprites per video line, but this is what got me off my butt and made me implement the TMS9918A in an FPGA rather than trying to use a real TMS9918A:

http://spatula-city.org/~im14u2c/vdp-99xx/

Specifically, the "master timing" diagram by Sergio Maggi.
 
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