man short memory's
wednesday, 16 March 2011 10:30 a.m
Hi Tim (and all),
We're not quite ready to release the design just yet, but if / when we decide to kill the ZVG, I will open source the hardware / firmware. I won't let it just fade away into obscurity... I'll let it fight its way into obscurity!
-Zonn
On 3/15/2011 2:49 PM, Tim Matthews wrote:
Hi Zonn,
I placed an order this afternoon so hopefully I got in before they'd all been allocated, but myself and some fellow arcade collectors had been wondering (prior to this announcement) about the feasibility of reproducing the ZVG if you were no longer interested in making them any more.
I just wondered if you had any thoughts on this? Our intention was to do this in limited quantities so that people who really wanted them could obtain one, not to go into mass production and make thousands of them. Would there be any interest on your part about us doing this? If this ever got off the ground we would be selling them at cost as this is strictly not for profit - it's about getting them into the hands of VACers who need them but have been unable to buy any of the limited stocks, so we would be quite happy to agree some licensing agreement but the margin would be slim i.e. basically whatever you wanted in terms of licensing costs would be added to the unit price.
Is this a complete no-go or would you possibly be interested?
thanks,
tim
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Zonn <mlists@zonn.com>
Date: 15 March 2011 21:22
Subject: VECTOR: Last run of ZVGs
To: vectorlist@vectorlist.org
Hey all,
We're populating the last of our ZVG PCBs, and this has to be our last run. Some parts are becoming hard to get, and the cost of assembly is getting high.
We found 42 ZVG PCBs and were able to get all the parts we needed. They're currently being manufactured and, since I'm keeping two of them, 40 will shipping in 2 to 3 weeks.
The website is taking orders now (zektor.com/zvg), and we're selling them on a first come first serve basis.
We're making these because we found these PCBs while doing some spring cleaning, but we're not going to have any more PCBs made, so this it!
We're also out of Vectrex cables and won't be making anymore, but they're easy to make and all the info, including Digikey part numbers, is available online in the download section.
-Zonn
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Unsubscribe, subscribe, or view the archives at http://www.vectorlist.org
** Please direct other questions, comments, or problems to chris@westnet.com
__________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 5841 (20110202) __________
The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus.
----- Original Message -----
From: Jeremy Abel
To: vectorlist@vectorlist.org
Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2012 3:59 PM
Subject: Re: VECTOR: ZVG firmware / the future of ZVG
Wait wait wait, how did we get from me wanting to redesign and reprogram the ZVG for USB connectivity to sound in DOS?
On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 11:17 PM, Jamesjonhagen <jamesjonhagen@gmail.com> wrote:
Exactly, sometimes a different card can work as well. I have several Creative sound blaster 128s PCI that have worked in a pinch when a Live would not, bought those for $5 each.
Getting back to the OP though- It can often be hard enough to get sound going even with older PCs... but using a PC that's newer (and missing the p. port) I've found the chances of DOS sound working with those MBs to be slim. I would make sure you can run sound in DOS Mame first on various newer MBs before attempting to modify the ZVG to use USB.
That said, I've had no luck with DOS Mame sound on anything beyond the P4 era but would love to be proven wrong.
James H
On Apr 16, 2012, at 10:56 PM, James Rhew <james@rhew.org> wrote:
I had lots of trouble with my Dell P4 / OEM Soundblaster Live! value. An Ensoniq 1371 based Soundblaster worked fine. It's a time intensive but inexpensive crap-shoot.
On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 10:20 PM, Jamesjonhagen <jamesjonhagen@gmail.com> wrote:
Not to be overly negative but I've had failure with SB live cards too. Especially with MBs using integrated sound. Turning that off in the BIOS allowed to use the Live card but the frequency sounded double or just didn't work.
I'm just saying, it can be a real crapshoot depending on the BIOS. That said, I've had good luck with PIII Gateway AMD based MBs
James
On Apr 16, 2012, at 8:00 PM, Al Warner <alw@alsarcade.com> wrote:
From what I found out, if you want a PCI sound card to work in DOS, it has to be a Soundblaster Live! Now that said, i paid like $12.00 shipped for one on eBay.
-Al-
On 4/16/2012 7:26 PM, Jamesjonhagen wrote:
Not all PCs of the PIII P4 era work well with sound cards in DOS. Having a parallel port is just half the battle. That's good that you can spread the word of a model that works Al.
James Hagen
Sent from my iPhone
On Apr 16, 2012, at 7:22 PM, Al Warner <alw@alsarcade.com> wrote:
I used a Pentium 4 Gateway to build mine - still real easy to buy cheap on eBay. Video of the details at:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL51665B28C8D84DA5&feature=plcp
Just sayin'
-Al-
On 4/16/2012 7:04 PM, Gary McTaggart wrote:
I'm not too deep on this, but I've heard from coworkers that have done some general latency testing (not related to ZVG) that USB can introduce quite a bit of latency compared to even an add-on parallel port, although a lot of the newer add-on parallel ports can be terrible too. They takeaway they had from these tests is that anyone that really wants low latency should buy an ancient PC. :(
Gary
On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 3:59 PM, Jeremy Abel <jeremyabel@gmail.com> wrote:
Well crap, there goes that idea. I'm going to call Zonn, see if he's into me redesigning and recoding the zvg for usb. That's pretty much the only option at this point, assuming he set the lock bits (although I never have for any of my projects...)
On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 6:39 PM, GamingDevices <gamingdevices@tx.rr.com> wrote:
The Atmel ATmega16 & ATtiny2313 devices used in the ZVG have lock bits, so I doubt that you can just read the part.
Mike
On 4/16/2012 4:59 PM, Jeremy Abel wrote:
Hello all!
So, I've got my vector monitor (or at least the post office does; I have to go pick it up), and I've been investigating ways to control it. So far, the ZVG seems like the best / only option. However, they seem to be hard to come by, and a bit out of my price range, not to mention the fact that they just aren't being made anymore. Making it even more complicated, I don't even have a PC with a parallel port (only a macbook). Instead, I've come up with several other options, which I will talk about below.
Using the schematic that's available online, I've managed to re-enter the whole thing into EagleCAD, and have begun to design my own board for it, using only through-hole parts (because I don't have the patience / skill to solder SMDs). So far, only the power supply area is done, because I don't want to put too much effort into it before getting some more information about the whole thing. I'm doing this only because it would cost me $100 to print the board, and then $50 in parts, which is about $100 less than I'd end up paying for an original ZVG. There is one snag though: basically, I need the firmware that goes on the two Atmel chips. Without that, I might as well not even bother. So, I've come up with some solutions to that problem. Here's what I've been thinking:
Option 1: I somehow manage to get ahold of Zonn (no luck with that so far), and somehow convince him to open-source the firmware (something he talked about here, about a year ago). With access to the actual code, I could pretty easily convert it to communicate over USB. With Zonn's permission, I would then open source the entire thing, and thus you all would have a lovely new open-source USB-enabled ZVG. This, I think, is the best option, as I don't need anyone to dump the firmware for me, I don't need to logic probe the thing and figure out what's being sent over the parallel port, and I don't need to program an interpreter to convert the thing into USB.
Option 2: Someone with a ZVG solders up headers to J5 and J6, and uses an AVR programmer to read off the firmware and sends it to me as a hex file. I can then use this to program my own atmel chips, and proceed. However, this will make it difficult for me to get around the parallel port problem without a large amount of logic-probing and then adding another microcontroller to convert the signals being sent to the parallel port into signals I can send over USB. In order to keep Zonn's IP safe, I'd keep the whole thing to myself. Still, this feels shady.
Option 3: I buy a ZVG from someone, dump the firmware myself, then sell it back to someone else. This feels just as shady, maybe more, than option 2.
What do you all think about all of this? I'd love to get the ball rolling on this, preferably on option 1 if anyone knows how to get ahold of Zonn.
Thanks,
~Jeremy
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Unsubscribe, subscribe, or view the archives at http://www.vectorlist.org
** Please direct other questions, comments, or problems to chris@westnet.com
Received on Tue Apr 17 02:48:13 2012
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Tue Apr 17 2012 - 07:50:02 EDT