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Subject: Multitech/Flite Electronics Microprofessor series computers.
Replies: 9 Views: 2223
plzgvhug 3/4/2007 - 1:35:57
Talk about these fantastic educational and versatile software and hardware development tools here. Disscuss your software programing tips and any projects you have built using these systems. *
plzgvhug 4/6/2007 - 1:30:04
This is what my home made computers are based on, except i built mine on vero board, and added extra hardware and increased clock speed. *
plzgvhug 4/11/2007 - 2:08:39
I discovered the awesome microprofessor - MPF1B way back in 1990 when i was doing an btec electronics engineering course. I used them in the parts of the digital electronics and microprocessors sections of the course. I had a maplin z80 cpu board with a monitor program and keyboard for entering instructions but its design was nowhere nears as good as the MPF1B. *
plzgvhug 4/11/2007 - 2:23:14
For a start the Microprofessor - MPF1B had the ability to save and load your programs to a cassette tape. Its monitor program allowed you to single step through your program and look at the cpu registers. It allowed you to set a breakpoint in your program so that it stopped at a point you wanted. It had some basic editing features like copying code blocks to different place in memory and an insert and delete commands. It had a relative jump calculation command. And it had amazingly a BASIC interpreter as well. It came with a parralle port and a counter timer too. You had to get used to using a six digit led display. *
plzgvhug 4/11/2007 - 2:40:10
Of course now i new i had to have one of these. So i built my own on veroboard. I got a copy of the ROM so it was essentialy the same thing except i didnt add the parralle port or the counter/timer. I added an expansion connector to it. I used to have great 'birds nests' of wires every where and different boards for different circuits. My first attempt at building an MPF1B worked well enough except the connectors wernt very reliable. So i built another version of this computer and added the parralle port and counter time this time. By now i was getting really quite good at writing low level machine code programs. About 1993 i decided to sell my first version of the mpf1b to an engineer who worked at Nokia where i also worked at the time. It was to recoup some cash to build an even bigger better computer. *
plzgvhug 4/11/2007 - 2:51:56
The bigger better version of the MPF1B or as i now called it, UPF-1D had the same OS. Running a monitor and with the same BASIC as the original. Buy that time i had developed an interest in digital music and synths so that was gonna be a major feature of this machine. The ram on earlier versions was only 8Kb so i new i need much much more ram. I added many extra hardware features to the design. I built it with the very highest quality parts i could buy too which is why its still running to this very day. *
plzgvhug 4/11/2007 - 3:11:08
The design took shape. To satisfy my interest in electronic music i added a MIDI interface which has a 6850 serial interface chip and the associated circuitry to convert to the midi standard for keyboards etc. Next i added an 8 bit digital to an*louge converter and an 8bit an*louge to digital converter. This is to allow me to record and play sound and generate waveforms etc. Then to satisfy my need for more memory i gave it 128Kb of ram. I designed the ram to be paged as 16 blocks of 8Kb so that i didnt have to design extra address decoding. It meant if i added more ram later the page would become 16 blocks of 16kb and that meant almost a 1Mb of memory was possible fully expanded. I added a real time clock to enable timing events to be handled accuratley and i even wrote a digital clock software too. Then i also added the Z80PIO parrelle interface chip and the Z80CTC counter time chip to finish it off. *
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