Coprocessors for BBC micro

General "chat", not necessarily MTX related
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Bill B
Posts: 593
Joined: 26 Jan 2014 16:31

Coprocessors for BBC micro

Post by Bill B »

Very off-topic for this forum, but I know Martin at least is a BBC micro fan.

I came across an article in the MagPi magazine of using an RPi to emulate multiple second processors for a BBC micro. Details can be found here.
Martin A
Posts: 799
Joined: 09 Nov 2013 21:03

Re: Coprocessors for BBC micro

Post by Martin A »

It's not totally off topic. I did have a look at the project a while back, to see if it was possible to do a MTX coprocessor the same way.

It the time I couldn't find any of the regular Pi stockists that had the pi Zero in stock and then sort of forgot the idea.

The host side hardware on the MTX probably doesn't need any more than the 2 LVC245's and a small CPLD to do the decode. The software might not be so straightforwad though.

I do have the real thing though, I've got the Z80B co-pro attacherd to my Master 128, and beleive Dave has the same for his BBC B. We're probably not the only ones!
Bill B
Posts: 593
Joined: 26 Jan 2014 16:31

Re: Coprocessors for BBC micro

Post by Bill B »

Yes, the Pi Zero can be hard to find (although I notice that PiHut have them in stock at the moment).

The ZeroW (or WH) is often easier to find. And that would offer the possibility of adding WiFi to the MTX. Although the PiTubeDirect is bare metal, and I don't know whether anyone has got WiFi working in bare metal. But if designing an MTX interface from scratch (rather than emulating the existing BBC Tube interface) it would probably be possible to come up with something that is less time critical.
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