Fixing my Jupiter Ace Clone

I am in the process of writing a post about how the video system on the Jupiter Ace works, and that is coming together nicely, but it would be useful if I had a Jupiter Ace I could wire up to a logic analyser to get some traces.

I do have lots of Minstrel 4th's and Minstrel 4D's, but those have all of the counter logic inside the microcontroller, so I really need something that uses the original schematic that I can poke things at.

Unfortunately, I don't have a real Jupiter Ace, but I remember about 5 years ago (January 2019 I think), I did have a go at building a clone of the Jupiter Ace, with pretty much the original schematic. This would be ideal, if I could just get it to work.......

At the time I had the Minstrel 2 and 3 boards that used the ZX81 form factor, so it seemed a good idea to use the same for this.

It was quite a squeeze to fit it in there, with all the logic chips and half of the worlds supply of 1K resistors.

The original Ace had three pairs of 2114 static RAM chips giving the three 1K blocks, system RAM, video RAM and font RAM. I can't get new 2114 chips, and the used / New Old Stock ones are not always very good, so I decided to replace all of them with three skinny DIP 32K SRAM chips.

(yes, I wired one of the pins wrong on the 74LS166)

You might think that is a bit wasteful, but they are cheaper than 2114s, and they are even cheaper than the 8K versions of the same thing. The two video parts only use 1K, the main RAM provides the 1K system RAM and also a 16K expansion.

I put it all together with a ZX81 replacement keyboard membrane, with an overlay in the style of the Ace keyboard.

When I came to fire it up, it seemed to work, but there were some random characters on the screen, and some of the characters were corrupted.

The video was also very fuzzy, I had based the composite video mixer and amplifier on the Jupiter Ace 4000 version which had composite video out (the original Ace didn't), so I thought I would use that. But it was a bit ropey, so I later adapted it to the same circuit I had used on the Minstrels.

The video signal was much clearer, but the character corruption was still there, and seemed to get worse the more you used it. I couldn't work out what was wrong, but it did seem to be otherwise working.

At the same time, I had designed another board, one which used dual port RAM to simplify things, and that one also just about worked, but seemed a better place to start from for what became the Minstrel 4th and later the Minstrel 4D - read about that here - http://blog.tynemouthsoftware.co.uk/2020/05/minstrel-goes-forth.html

I did return to the original board a few times. At seems at this point I had decided to call it JACK (Jupiter Ace Computer Kit). It seems I decided Minstrel 4th was a better name.

I am not even sure what all this was trying to address, but it didn't seem to fix any problems.

Another few months later, I tried again. I noticed the clock signal was a bit weak, so I tried replacing the transistor based crystal oscillator with one made from two inverters, a more tried and tested solution. Yes, that is a bit of a cut up one of my RC2014 modules. (I later found out that the weak clock was actually down to a bad gate on the 74LS86 that buffered the clock, when I tried to use that spare gate to invert the video)

That seemed to help, and with some of the other modifications, it had reached the point where it would start with a clear screen one reset out of three, but even when it was clear, you could run VLIST and all would look fine until it got to the bottom line and then bits of the screen would get corrupted.

By this point, the Minstrel 4th was going well, so I put this away in a box again and forgot about it.

Roll forward to today, and it would be quite useful if I could get this to it to work, so back out of the box and onto the bench.

I removed most of the previous mods to go back to basically what was in the schematic, with the exception of the alternative oscillator and composite video buffer circuits.

I decided to analyse the problem further, now I have a better scope and a better logic analyser and what passes for a fresh pair of eyes.

My initial thought was that there were unintentional writes happening to the two video RAM chips, so I probed those and looked out for anything unusual.

Because of the way the video system works (see the future blog post), the video RAM and character RAM are both enabled most of the time as they are generating the video signal.

I did see occasional glitches in the chip enable signals. Very short and only a single sample wide when scanning at 50MHz. But the edge that creates could be enough to trigger a write cycle in the RAM chip, if they occurred when write was low.

Ah, there you are, that would trigger an unwanted video RAM write cycle, and would explain the corruption.

That probably wasn't an issue with the slower 2114 SRAM chips originally used, but because the modern 71256 chips I used here were a lot faster, they were treating those glitches as edges and getting corrupted.

Those signals are produced from an assortment of logic gates and a slightly strange loop around buffer based delay.

I decided I wouldn't change any of those, since this was just due to faster RAM, I tried to fix it just before the signal gets to the RAM chips. I tried gating the write signal with the 6.5MHz clock, that moved the write pulses away from the jagged edge where the occasional glitches were occurring. It does mean multiple write pulses, but I don't think that will be a problem. I could maybe use the 3.25MHz clock, but this seems to work nicely as is.

It did mean one more chip was required, but I used a 74LS00, and if I was to do another spin of the board, a single 74LS00 could do both the crystal oscillator, clock buffer and the clock gating of the video RAM write pulse, keeping all the 6.5MHz signals in one place. (would anyone be interested if I was to do another revision of this board to fix the various issues and make it available as a kit?)

Even with the output buffer changed to the circuit I used on the other Minstrels, the video output of this circuit is still not great. It has no back porch to set the black level, but the screen is all black, so it just needs good strong white peaks, but the 74LS series logic never really generates those, so the screen is a bit grey and washed out. I probably need to tweak the resistor values in the buffer circuit to get the levels better.

Ideally I would also add a back porch generation circuit to make it more correct, and maybe switch over the 74HC or 74HCT logic, but this is good enough for the moment.

And there you go, perfect vlist with no corruption.

The 16K expansion is working with the top of RAM showing as 32K, and all the character set seems to be printing correctly with no corruption.

I did not have much luck loading programs from cassette, as seems typical with the Jupiter Ace, so in the end I just wired up the ear input to the mic output of a Minstrel 4D.

I loaded the built-in Tut Tut on the 4D and then typed save TUTTUT on there and load TUTTUT on the Jupiter Ace clone and it loaded first time.

This is a good test as it modifies the character set.

That all looks good.

I always like to play out at least the first level.

All good apart from the sound not working, the speaker is just clicking. I will need to have a look at that, I think it was working, so was maybe damaged when I cleaned the board with IPA. The video side of things is all working which was my main aim, and all I need for now.

Why didn't I wire the ear input to the signal out of the microcontroller on the 4D, then you could have loaded things more easily? Ah well (as I found out after trying that a few too many times before I realised), it always loads in turbo mode, and of course the Ace clone doesn't have a turbo, so has to load at slow speed.

I am not used to running the Ace in it's normal colour scheme. I normally chose black text, white background on the Minstrel 4D. Makes it a sort of "3D Monster maze: Night vision edition".

That also highlights a mistake I made with the keyboard overlays. The up / down / left / right keys are on 5, 6, 7 and 8, the same as the ZX81 etc. But, for reasons best known to themselves, 6 and 7, down and up are reversed. I didn't have a working Jupiter Ace at the time I did those, so I didn't realise, and left the arrow graphics as they had been on the ZX80, which is wrong.

I still managed to find the exit in the end though.

Look out for the "How the Jupiter Ace Generates Video" post coming soon.

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Minstrel 4D

The Minstrel 4D is a much more reliable and usable Jupiter Ace compatible computer, with all the extras like a joystick interface, SD card loader, RC2014 expansion bus etc. Available in kit and built form from The Future Was 8 bit.

https://tfw8b.com/product/minstrel-4d-turbo-jupiter-ace-compatible-computer-kit/

More info in a previous post:

http://blog.tynemouthsoftware.co.uk/2022/08/minstrel-4d-overview.html

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Sinclair 5x8 Keyboards

Today I am going to have a look at the evolution of the 5x8 matrix keyboards used on Z80 machines from Sinclair (and others).

They all follow a similar format to the matrix shown below on the keyboard PCB from one of my Minstrel ZX8x clones.

The matrix is composed of 8 rows of 5 keys. The 5 columns are mirrored on the right hand rows. Here you can see the rows are not ordered sequentially, presumably whatever was most convenient for PCB layout.

I have tried various ways of drawing the switches in those schematics, and I think those angled ones I drew are the clearest.

I just need to be careful not to use them individually, as they keep reminding me of V.I.N.CENT from Black Hole when I do.

The ZX80

The first to use this format was the Sinclair ZX80. I am not aware of any machines before that which had a full alphanumeric keyboard with only 40 keys. Most were either 16-20 key hexadecimal keypads or much larger more traditional style keyboards.

For a closer view, here is one of my overlay stickers which can be used to convert a ZX81 membrane for use with other machines. You can see they use the 10 numbers, 26 letters, and the remaining 4 keys are shift, new line (a.k.a. enter or return), space and dot / comma. It would have been nice to have also had a delete key, but that is achieved on most of these keyboards as SHIFT + 0 (on the ZX80/81 called "rubout").

The next step is the ZX81, but a the ZX81 ROM was available as an upgrade for the ZX80 (supporting all functions apart from the new NMI controlled flicker free slow mode). In order to keep in style with the ZX80, I produced another overlay in the style of the ZX80, but with the ZX81 graphics and keywords.

The ZX81

The actual ZX81 used the more familiar colour scheme of black, white with red highlights.

This was also used on the TS1000 with some minor changes.

The ZX80, ZX81 and TS1000 all used the same key arrangement. The only changes on the TS1000 were the replacement of the names RUBOUT and NEW LINE by the more familiar terms DELETE and ENTER.

The changes from the ZX80's original integer maths based 4K BASIC to the floating point maths 8K ROM found in the other machines were more noticeable. Many new keywords were added, and most of the existing keywords and graphics were moved around.

Jupiter ACE

The first deviation from that key layout came with the Jupiter Ace. Not a Sinclair product, but close enough to be considered here.

At first glance, it appears to use the same layout, different graphics and keywords, but the keys are in the same places. However, although the physical keyboard placed symbol shift where the dot/comma key had been, electrically it is wired where Z would normally be. Z is where X would be, X where C would be and so on until M which is where dot/comma would have been.

I did make an overlay that would allow a ZX81 keyboard membrane to be used on a Jupiter Ace (or Minstrel 4th ). Here you can see the Z,X,C etc. keys are shifted one place to the right.

This may have been to avoid copyright (I am thinking of the Micro Ace ZX80 clone that tried to avoid copyright by swapping two of the data lines in the ROM so it was no longer binary identical when read outside of the machine). It is also useful to be able to check the two modifier keys on the same row.

If they had used the ZX81 matrix, the Symbol Shift would have been on Row 8 and Shift on row 6.

The ZX Spectrum

The next machine from Sinclair was the ZX Spectrum. This also had a 5x8 matrix keyboard from the ZX80 and ZX81, the use of Enter and Delete from the TS1000 and the Symbol Shift key from the Jupiter ACE. (oh, and it was colour and you could play Jet Pac on it etc.)

I did make an overlay in the Spectrum style for use with a Spectrum clone, You can see the Spectrum, although very compact is somewhat larger that it's predecessor.

The Spectrum also has a Symbol Shift key on the right, but this time it is in the matching location in the matrix. Other than the name changes, all the rest looks the same, but ah, no, two of the address lines have been switched.

I would have expected Sinclair to keep the same keyboard layout. I am not aware of any specific reason for the switch, routing the membrane maybe, but then that could have been switched on the PCB. Maybe the address lines used for the rows may have been accidentally transposed during the construction of the ZX Spectrum prototype (seen here at the Centre for Computing History - http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/51620/Sinclair-ZX-Spectrum-Prototype/) 

The ZX Spectrum +

The next machine to be released was a Spectrum+, this was a larger case, but had the same board inside, and therefore had to use the same 5x8 keyboard matrix. But it had extra keys?

The extra keys were created using trick membranes that pressed two keys simultaneously. All of the extra keys are simply combinations of two of the existing keys When you press the " key, it actually pressed Symbol Shift and P at the same time, so it is interpreted as ". Left arrow is Shift and 5 etc.

That is achieved mechanically by the mulitple layers of membrane pressing two separate keys at the same time. You can't electrically connect them together or you end up shorting rows or columns out permanently.

To get around this electrically, if there is a row or column in common, you need to add diodes, for example on the Spectrum, Edit is Caps Shift + 1, both of which are in column 1.

You can make a dedicated Edit button with one switch and two diodes.

The Spectrum +2

This layout persisted to the end of the ZX Spectrum range, with the same technique being used on the Spectrum + 128K and the grey Spectrum +2.

The grey +2 membrane looks more complex, but still has just the 5x8 matrix connections.

The Amstrad designed +2A/B/+3 black machines had the same external appearance, but underneath they had a different keyboard matrix.

Rather than 5x8 like all the previous keyboards, this was 11x13 and there was no magic double layered membrane.

With all the extra connections, it looks like an 11x13 matrix, but in fact it is the good old 5x8 matrix and a completely separate 6x5 matrix. (I'll cheat here and use the diagram from the service manual rather than redrawing it)

Other than those minor anomalies, the same matrix survived intact for most of the 1980s. Even the competition when trying to make a machine of a similar size and cost had 50% more keys.

After a long romance with 100+ key keyboards (like the beloved IBM Model M I am typing this on), it seems we will never go back to the elegant simplicity of 5x8 matrix keyboard.

But again, saying that, with those awful touch screens taking over everywhere (give me a buckling spring any day), a return to a simpler interface with fewer keys does seem to be underway.

Third Party Keyboards

There were several after market keyboards for the ZX81 and ZX Spectrum that also added extra keys. How did they work? Well, tune in next week to find out. I will be reverse engineering some of them to see what all of this extra gubbins does.

• http://blog.tynemouthsoftware.co.uk/2022/05/reverse-engineering-a-zx-spectrum-keyboard.html

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The various overlay stickers and keyboard PCBs for the ZX80, ZX81, Minstrel 2, 3 and 4th are available from my SellMyRetro store:

• https://www.sellmyretro.com/store/tynemouth-software

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