Augusto Baffa
After the Baffavision project and reading some notes by J.B. Langston, I realized that I could continue studying to make Baffa-2 an MSX clone. I already had CPU, VDP (video card), PSG (sound card), clock and base memory (64KBs), so I just had to put it all together with a parallel peripheral interface (PPI) msx.
In Brazil, we only had contact with MSX1. There were some national kits to upgrade it to an MSX2 but most people didn't upgrade at the time. For this reason, I thought of creating a clone of what we had contact with and based it on the schematics of one of our main machines: Sharp's Hotbit (HB-8000).
I still plan to add a serial via wifi to be able to connect it to the internet and the printer interface card (using DB29 connector). In the future I also see that it is possible to create a memory mapper and a VDP using the v9958 chip, which will allow compatibility with MSX2.
I am proud to say that this project is sponsored by PCBWay.
Other Acknowledgments:
- PS/2 Keyboard matrix firmware is adapted from Danjovic's EXPS/2 project code
- TMS9918 VDP is based on J.B.Langston's Game Boards for RC2014
- AY-8910 PSG is inspired on Ed. Brindley's YM2149F/AY-3-8910 sound card for RC2014
- Baffa-X IDE is an adaptation of Egor (SOLID) Voznesensky's Beer 202 ATA IDE for MSX
MSX-2+ Setup:
I've been working on a MSX upgrade during last months and between february and april I got stuck due to many v9958 fake chips. I could have everything working in early April and define the organization of the boards after testing. MSX2 uses VDP v9938 while MSX2+ uses VDP v9958 and has a real time clock. Unfortunately the Beer 202 IDE does not have ROM support for MSXDOS2 and it was necessary to replace it with an interpretation of Sunshine IDE.
