Philips VG-8010 MSX First Steps

hi it's Ian beta and in this episode I want to take a first look at something that is completely new to me as well as to this channel the MSX line of computers namely this Philips vg8010 from 1985. [Music] as X computers are pretty interesting historically because they were a collaboration between several different manufacturers of electronics including Philips Sony Panasonic Hitachi made some and they all came up with a computer architecture that they would build machines for the collaboration also included Microsoft that's why these machines run Microsoft basic which most 8-bit computers of the era do the whole thing started sometime in the 80s and there were several models from numerous manufacturers and as I said they pretty much all share is similar if not the same architecture ideally it would be the same architecture but there are some slight variations they all use z80 processor they use a common Texas Instruments Graphics I see they use the same a ey sounds chip and they all have similar cartridge ports they are under this flap here so the software for these MSX systems should be compatible between systems even if they are from a different manufacturer which was kind of a new approach to the whole thing considering that at the time there were mostly separate systems which were incompatible at all even if they used similar architectures like the 6502 processor for example in The Ataris in The Commodores and in the Apple twos and these were pretty successful in Japan and parts of Europe they were not that successful in the United States for some reason there were also msx-2 systems around which had a couple of improvements better graphics chips and I think more RAM as a standard that varied from system to system this one claims it has 48k of ram but really it just has 32k of Ram plus 16k of video RAM which isn't really usable by the processor so yeah bit of false advertising on here but this is 32k Ram MSX one machine there were msx2s and there are also msx2 pluses which improved on the architecture slightly as you can see my vg8010 which is the second MSX computer that Philips made works completely and fully and it is in good as new near mint condition I got it complete inbox even came with the manual this is the German version of that the original power supply is also here and I have the box which doesn't look that nice I'm going to show that later I guess but the computer itself seems to work fine uh not much to do on this repair wise but there's some stuff I want to take a look at today the VGA to 10 actually was Philip's second attempt to build an MSX computer the vg8000 wasn't that successful it basically used the same case and the same keyboard and things like that but it wasn't fully compatible with the MSX standard I don't know why they got that wrong because the standard probably was laid out at that point but for some reason the 8000 model was not fully compatible this one allegedly is so the only problem we are going to run into when we're trying to run software is the lack of ram some MSX ones have 64k of RAM and actually it became kind of a standard for the MSX series later on so some new your games won't run some of the old ones only use 16k of ram so they should run fine and some homebrews only use 16k or a little bit above that this has 32k as I said so we're going to be able to run some software on this I guess this ended up in my possession by accident uh so to say I was looking for a particular Philips monitor that I had back in the day and I used it with my Commodore 64 my first computer that I owned myself so when I did the video series about recreating my original Commodore 64 setup I looked at eBay auctions and things like that and the only eBay auction at the time that had one of the monitors I had back in the day was one which the main attraction was this MSX and uh the monitor was kind of a gimmick for the auction so I bid on it and it wasn't really expensive I don't know what I paid I I don't quite remember because it's been a couple of years I think something like 50 Euros or something which is a steal for the Monitor and working MSX system and then I kind of completely forgot about this and uh just recently I stumbled upon this again uh sitting in its original box and I wanted to try it out so I made a crude monitor cable here's my monitor cable which I made from an old audio cable this is just composite out the French version of this which is black on this part that's how you can tell them apart has an RGB out actually this one has an RF out and a composite out which is not very good as you've probably seen on the screen here but still we get a picture out of this color picture uh full color actually the PIN notes for the connectors are in the manual so I looked at this and as you can see there's a pin out for the RGB version which this doesn't use and a pin out for the pal version the regular pal version for the rest of Europe outside France which has composite out and it's just an eight pin round DIN connector not the horseshoe shaped one like the c64 uses but a circular one so that's the one you need and I just basically soldered the composite video which is pin 5 to one of the signal lines and both grounds on my audio cable together to pin two and pin 3 to another signal line and that's my sound output so that works with every standard composite monitor that I've tried so that's quite good and as was pretty much standard back in the day the user manual is super concise and we have an introduction to basic we have uh memory maps of the system we have all the functions we even have the characters set back in here printed out we have uh as I said the pinouts for the connectors we have some uh technical intricacies uh and keyboard layouts things like that super nice manual as with almost all 8-bit computers back in the 80s and just in case you want your own pcbs made I highly recommend checking out this sponsor for this video PCB way my favorite manufacturer of prototype pcbs of all kinds you just send them your Gerber files for your specific PCB and they are going to make it without any problems in a variety of colors and there's a lot of options that you can choose from production times are super fast and delivery is quick so check out the link in the video description back to the MSX so this video is just going to be kind of an overview and I'm going to do some smaller things there's also going to be a full restoration video at some point basically mostly the electronics because as you can see it looks absolutely Immaculate from the outside so no case Restoration needed at all on this one it's a super neat design I really like that but uh the curves the keys ooh why so left is here right is here down here and upper sphere and they actually changed that in the next model the vg8020 they have them actually facing the direction where they point so uh and also it's like one of these Chiclet keyboards which is horrible to type on frankly and they also changed that in the next incarnation of the system we have cartridge ports actually two of them you could run things like I think a memory expansion and a game or another cartridge software cartridge at the same time some of the later MSX models only have one cartridge slot and that's as far as I've heard is enough for most stuff this also has an output for a cassette recorder this is the power socket we have a reset button yay we have a pair of joystick ports actually these are de-9 connectors but they are not quite compatible with uh for example Commodore joysticks they are compatible for the most part but not fully we're going to take a look at that later this is our monitor output which has the composite signal some voltages and the sound signal on it and this is our RF out and that's pretty much all there's to the main system and then we have the vu0022 power supply elementation this is the power supply for the system and it provides 5 volts plus 12 and -12 volts these were made in France actually the Philips production was in France at the time this has the nice clunky on off switch it's pretty lightweight so I wonder if this is a switching power supply maybe it is it should probably if it provides uh 1.55 amps it's a 5 volt rail it would need a really huge Transformer if it wasn't a switching power supply so uh we're going to take a look at this today and also because I don't have a suitable tape recorder I mean you could use any tape recorder probably with a proper cable but I didn't make that cable yet I'm also going to make a little cartridge for the MSX using this PCB that my friend Ollie makes who most of you probably know as banjo guy Ollie who does excellent cover versions of video game tunes on his YouTube channel and he actually also has a YouTube channel where he Tinkers with old systems the 8-Bit man chat which I highly recommend too so I'm going to link those channels in the video description and ALDI is one of the nicest people in the Retro Community anyway so I highly recommend checking out his work okay first things first I want to take this thing apart the connector on this actually is a four-pin din which interestingly has two indentations for the direction it plugs in the pin out is also in the user manual so you can easily make your own the user manual is also available online on the MSX Wiki if I'm not mistaken I'm going to link that in the video description as well so this should open up quite easily I think it has four screws if I'm not mistaken nope there we go oh it's upside down wow okay and this is indeed a very old school switching power supply it seems small transformer or it's actually I think no it's one Transformer in a strange strange package that I didn't see before I don't think these blue ones are Phillips brand caps actually these other blue ones are Phillips brand as well they don't make capacitors anymore they have been the capacitor division at least was bought out by vishai who make the capacitors now which looks similar but not as shiny so these are really old school Phillips capacitors and this is the Nippon chemical I think yeah I think it would be a good idea to replace the electrolytic capacitors in this I think that's going to be the first thing I do and this is also quite handy because you can unplug this yay that's all on off switch we can just unplug that then our board is free and there are some pretty peculiar things about this you have one they use this 2.2 microfarad electrolytic capacitor over this plastic capacitor or polyester film probably capacitor let's just sold it on to the legs of the orange capacitor there and they also used a lot of actual caps actually standing upright in a radial cap position kind of that's uh peculiar I don't know why they did that I know that Phillips made many actual caps and in some of these places it makes sense or there's also a resistor soldered over another resistor there or oh over a capacitor probably charging by the color okay this is some old school stuff but this is a mid 80s as I said this machine probably was made in 85. can't see any conclusive date codes on here though and the back side of the board looks super old school as well but as with all things Phillips made this seems to be pretty well made so uh there's a lot of space between the hot side which has the little uh Thunderbolt symbol on there because this is the hot side and this is where our DC voltages come out so no touchy touchy no you shouldn't touch any of this really while this is powered on we should also discharge the large capacitors some of those can hold really high voltages and are going to bite you if you don't discharge them I took a bit of a closer look at this and it seems like this one is the high voltage uh one for the switching power supply that is a 22 microfarad 358 volts capacitor which is a super uncommon value these days uh 22 microfarads is a common value but usually these capacitors are now 400 volts or 450 volts rated the ones for switching power supplies this is the one we want to discharge because this is the high power one or I'm just going to use my screwdriver to discharge this the other ones are all relatively low voltage and it seems like they are all standard capacitors general purpose caps so I'm going to replace all of these smaller ones and this 4700 I believe uh yeah microfarad one as well I'm mostly going to use radial capacitors for these positions because uh yeah as you can see the legs are just bent on these actual capacitors and should be super easy to fit uh radial capacitors in these positions yeah on these uh there's a ring where the negative side of the capacitor is on these Phillips actual capacitors so I'm going to be careful to not mix up the polarities maybe I'm even going to be able to find a proper replacement for this silver one but for now I'm going to leave it as is I am going to replace all the other ones in the hopes that I can clean up the voltages slightly and maybe make the picture quality of the output a bit better and obviously you could replace this with a modern power supply with these specifications 5 volts plus 12 and minus 12 volts are super common voltages these days as long as you go with something that outputs 1.55 amps on the 5 volt Rail and 100 milliamps on the 12 volt rails you're going to be fine so probably that would be a better idea but I'm kind of into using the old stuff as long as it works I want to take a look at this transistor or voltage regulator thing it has a kind of clamp that holds it to the heatsink we're going to have to remove that anyway because as usual I want to replace the heatsink compound on there as well just click on there we are it seems to be a bux 84 made by Philips pH probably that means Phillips it appears to be a bipolar npn 400 volts 2 amps 40 Watts transistor so yeah that's what that is and you can still get them yeah that's a standard transistor it seems let's do some recapping I'm going to go one capacitor at a time and I'm going to make sure I get the values and the polarity correct going to match the voltage closely you can go a bit higher voltage wise but you want to make sure that the capacitance is the exact same ah I see we have multiple options here so there's also a hole in a position that suits radio caps so probably they just used what they had at hand for these that fits fine and it connects to the correct spot yeah so I'm just going to do this and stop talking basically because it should be relatively straightforward [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] I don't have an actual replacement for this 22 microfarads 40 volts one so I'm just bending the pin on a radial one so we can fit this like so hopefully like this I just bend the positive leg so I made this into an actual capacitor unfortunately I don't have a replacement for this 2.2 microfarad one 63 volts the best I have is a radial 50 volt rated one I won't use that because I don't know which voltage this actually sees I'm just going to leave this in there just like the silver one this seems to be an actual cap as well the negative lag has been cut off so the can is the negative it acts as the negative hence this clamp here I think which just contacts the can and makes contact to the ground plane so that explains that so my next step after recapping the capacitors I have is going to be removing the old thermal compound with the Q-tip and some alcohol and put some new one in there on this transistor I'm using this vamma light pasta which is a common transistor silicon based thermal compound I'm just going to put some on there and then we're going to put the clip deck on okay that makes a very positive grip on our little transistor there so it's all back together let's uh put it in the case just for safety and test it interestingly this sits in here at a slight angle The Remains cable that goes here four screws should do the trick okay yeah I've connected everything back up and my power supply still works wrote a little basic program there ah it has a stop key which just stops the program how do I actually stop the program shift stop nope oh there we go control stop uh we can list this this is my program yeah as you can maybe see uh the picture quality is still not very good it's still kind of fuzzy but I think it got a bit better at least I'm going to leave this running for some time to make sure my power supply works okay nothing gets overly hot or anything like that seems to be promising so far no explosions yay and it still works after about an hour of running and power supply doesn't get overly hot or anything and the system still works so I suppose my recapping was a success yeah obviously it would be nice to run something else on this apart from my self promotion here so I'm going to build one of these cartridge pcbs so these little boards are pretty straightforward really you put an eeprom socket in there and an electrolytic capacitor a ceramic capacitor and you can use some jumpers I'm going to put pin headers in these positions but you can also just close the jumper position you need for the type of eprom you put in this socket or if you don't want a socket you can also solo the apron directly to the board I am not going to do that because I want some uh choice of eproms I want to be able to replace them and test things out this supports eproms from 27c 64 to 20 27c 512 which is 64 kilobytes for everything else you need some additional Logic for Bank switching so this is a versatile basic MSX cartridge PCB that Ollie made so here's all we need are 100 nanofarad ceramic capacitor which has 104 on it it's also written on the board I have a low profile 100 microfarad capacitor here which probably fits nicely in here standing upright otherwise you would have to bend it to the side in some way so you have enough room to insert this also some pin headers that are the uh not the round type of pin but the square type of pins so it can fit jumpers like the ones you plug in and 28 pin socket that you want to put in here in the correct orientation let's put it together and obviously we need an eeprom but uh we're going to get to that in a second or in a couple of seconds [Music] [Music] all right foreign [Music] PCV and now we just need a couple of little jumpers like these uh to set it up for the eprom type we are going to use speaking of which we should burn an eprom I have my trusty ThinkPad set up here with Windows running I have my mini pro eprom programmer and we're going to download a nice game for the NSX that should work on all msx's that have at least 16 kilobytes of RAM this game is by Juan j Martinez who made very nice games for the amstrad CPC for the Commodore 64 and for the NSX and also for the ZX spectrum and the PC I think so we are going to download night night which is a nice little platform puzzle type of game so we can download this and we get a ROM file which should be a binary file that we can program into an eprom a cassette file and also the manual is in here so let's download that and I'll be back in a second so this comes as a zip file I've already unzipped that and we have our cast file our ROM file and some pictures and the manual let's program the eprom I'm starting up my mini pro programmer and this is the 32k file so we need a 32k eprom so here's my assortment of eproms and I have a 27 c256 which is a 32 kilobytes eeprom here that I erased previously I'm going to put that in the programmer and load the ROM file in the software so obviously we have to select the correct eprom type which is an AMD am 27c256 tip 28 and all the settings should be perfect for our purpose here we can do a blank check although we have to uncheck the check ID here because these older eproms don't even have an ID and the software complains about that let's see if it's blank okay so now we can load our little file here which is the Knight K ROM and it's a standard binary file just loading this as is you can do the same with other cartridge ROMs for the MSX that are available on the internet so this should be totally programmable now and we're going to program our eprom I actually programmed one off camera previously night night I made a little label for it so now it's time to put it in our cartridge and that should just be a matter of putting it in here in the correct orientation we have already set this up with the jumpers to the settings according to 27c 256 jumper one jumper 7 jumper eight jump one number seven jump parade this should now be a game cartridge ideally let's see and it should go I think in slot one just like this and yeah it fits quite nicely in there so let's see what it does is this going to work or is it just going to blow up I hope it works let's see MSX MSX it's not working it just keeps resetting did I set the jumpers up correctly I think so it just keeps resetting something's wrong there I had to burn another eprom this time with uchusen gamma also by Juan and that's a 27c 512 eprom It's a larger game and this one actually runs I don't know why the other one didn't work but this one we can just play it's a nice Shoot Em Up and it totally works Sound Works everything seems to work not sure why the other one didn't work but maybe the eprom was broken or maybe the game isn't quite compatible with this MSX I'm not sure but uh at least we got this one working just the way I did the other one just with the larger eprom and the other file obviously you can also download that from Juan's website for free it's a nice game as well yeah there's only one thing left to do I guess yeah the last thing I'm going to do today is to make a little joystick adapter a standard Atari pin or joysticks that means they only have one fire button these two are actually mapped to the same pin on the connector so the directions and the fire button one are the same pin out like on for example the old Atari consoles and The Commodores so you can use these standard joysticks without any issues on the NSX joystick ports but there are some slight differences is in the pin out that make it impossible if not dangerous to use anything else than these standard joysticks so here's a little table of joystick pin outs that is available on the individual computers Wiki I'm going to link that in the video description as well and as you can see we have our standard Atari joystick that's what the thing I just showed you is basically we have up down left right pedal inputs one fire button a voltage Supply 5 volts and ground and some paddle inputs that we are not going to use usually for these standard joysticks the voltage Supply isn't used so that's not going to be connected in all the normal Atari standard joysticks however on joysticks that use for example an autofire or a slow-mo circuit or something like that we are going to have the five volt pin connected and also on some joysticks you're going to have a secondary fire button or a third fire button even and I'm going to build a little adapter because the pin out for the MSX in this column here you can see that the VCC goes to a pin that is usually connected to something else and we also have the button 2 connected to where usually the five volts is connected we have a strobe out and we have the grounds on a different pin than usual so I'm going to make a little adapter I'm going to take the Amiga standard which is the same as the Commodore 64 standard most joysticks I have are for that standard so I'm just going to wire this up according to the MSX standard so connect ground not to pin 8 on one end but to pin 9 and I'm going to connect the 5 volts to pin 5 live on the MSX side and I'm also going to hook up button 2. I don't have any joystick yet that has button 2 wired up at all but I'm still going to wire that up accordingly so that should be pretty straightforward we just need one male and one female de9 connector and a bit of cable and wire this up according to this diagram so we actually need eight strands of wire and the only cable I have that has that is this old network cable that I already cut the connector off so we are just going to use a piece of that and then wire it up to to de9 connectors and the housings that the connectors are going to go in are going to be added I'm just going to solo this should be pretty straightforward uh most of the pins just go straight through obviously we don't need a very long cable that I'm still going to Leave myself some room because this is the long cable uh that is pretty useless because it's a very old network cable I think I'm going to note down the wiring that I'm going to use so we're not going to run into any issues with that we also have nice grounds cable here that we are not sure maybe we're just going to use that for ground so it's even going to be shielded which doesn't really matter of short cable like this but yeah doesn't hurt so strip the insulation off of all these wires and I'm going to Tin each one of them I think we are not going to use all of them but I'm still going to Tin them all because I'm not sure which color I want to use for which connection yet there we go all the connections tinned so now I have my pin outs here and basically these uh this is one male and one female de9 connector and they just match up like this so uh pin one on the male one is here on the solder side this end here and uh on this female one it's actually here like on our pin out okay I think I'm going to start with this one this is the Commodore side of the adapter and this is going to be the one that plugs into our MSX so this is marked like this so it's going to be easier to find pins and this is the one that takes a bit of thinking I'm going to note down what we need uh the color codings of the connections here on this pin out and this is the pinout for the MSX so let's uh do that I guess [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] really confident that I made all the connections in the correct spots so we're just going to assemble these connectors we don't need to fit these parts here to screw down in a connector because none of the devices we have is going to support that anyway and that's just going to get into the way there we go that should be that let's test it ha I ran into a slight issue in that this connector doesn't uh make it all the way into the socket there because we have these clamps so I'm going to have to file those down I didn't see that coming uh yeah yeah that should be sufficient so here's my competition Pro that I repaired it was completely crumbled and I used one of those connectors on there too so that should fit fine let's see if our Auto fire works that means that the 5 volts is coming to the correct pin we're going to see fingers crossed I'm pushing the autofire this is autofire on these uh triangular buttons here yep that seems to work see if it works in game as well yep we indeed have autofire and the directions also work the normal fire also works so I think my adapter is a success unlike my playing yeah I think that's enough tinkering for this video the MSX my Philips vg8010 seems to work absolutely no problems whatsoever the power supply is a bit safer now my cartridge that I made works fine my adapter cable that allows me to connect standards Commodore joysticks to this works fine as I said there's probably going to be more MSX videos probably even about this machine or other machines maybe thank you very much for your support on patreon and on the channel memberships page and on Kofi and on PayPal and elsewhere hope to see you again on this channel sometime I'm Jan beta thanks for watching see you next time bye foreign

Channel: Jan Beta

Views: 18,300

Keywords: Jan Beta

Id: tIt9Go_RQTM

Length: 39min 54sec (2394 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 10 2022