I haven't written much about the PCB I have created to interface the V-Tech cartridge bus. That's mainly because I just haven't had enough experience designing PCBs so far, and didn't want to unleash a poorly designed and untested layout to the masses. So I spent 2018 doing a lot of design iterations on the so called V-Tech BusF###er cartridge, making it more configurable, reliable and debuggable.

It is 2019 now and I finally dared to send the first PCB layout to the manufacturing plant... And I was pleasantly surprised about the quality of the boards -- and disappointed about my skills ;-)  as I simply made a lot of stupid mistakes (connected wrong GNDs, didn't leave space for additional caps or pull-downs, made important traces impossible to reach etc.)

But as of July 2019, there are now several Rev C boards on my desk, each successfully serving a custom boot ROM and having latches and registers to allow for memory mapped I/O to custom periphery! That is: 8 bits of data going onto the bus, and 8 bits going out. That is enough for letting 8 LEDs blink or querying the state of 8 push buttons. (If this would have been a commercial product back in the 90s, I would definitely have wanted one! Imagine "V-Techuino" ;-) ). Oh, and the boards are now daisy-chainable! The more boards you add, the more fun there is, of course.

On the software side I have developed a Serial Loader ROM, which allows code to be sent over a USB-to-serial FTDI cable connected to the V-Tech printer port. Just one click and your code gets compiled, transmitted, relocated, linked and run. Hardware and software development is now much, much quicker!

I have also been contacted by a chap named Erik Olsen and we might be cooperating on this project from here on. We both dream of having some sort of DOS running on the PreComputer and we have already made some serious progress. Maybe using FRAM or re-purposing GameBoy Flash Carts.... hmmm..

Stay tuned!