etabeta's playground

…in Japan there was Kyocera (a.k.a. Kyoto Ceramics). In 1983, Kyocera produced the smallest and lightest portable computer of its time: the Kyotronic 85!

Its success, due to being cheap and fed by simple AA batteries, resulted many licensed clones across the world: TRS-80 Model 100, Olivetti M10, NEC PC-8201, etc.

Fast-Forward in time. In Nov 2008, I got interested in Olivetti M10 (and Model 100) because I found listings of both BIOS. Hence, I started writing a skeleton driver for MESS to support this hardware. I sketched the memory maps and added checksums. Not much more. Then I was forced to take a break, due to personal reasons, and I managed to come back to the driver only last week.

I updated the source to the latest core and, while looking for more info about the IO map in internet, a miracle happened: I stumbled in a preliminary driver to add NEC PC8201 to Xmess 0.37b13.2 (courtesy of Hamish Coleman)!!

I revamped its video code, added a couple of unmapped IO reads (devices to be added at a later stage)…

et voilà: I had a correct display of the emulated OS!

Say hello to:

• Olivetti M10 (not sure if Euro, US or both)
  

• Kyocera Kyotronic 85
  

• TRS-80 Model 100
  

• TRS-80 Model 102
  

• NEC PC-8201A (US version of the Japan-only NEC PC-8201 [1])
  

Not very exciting, yet. But I will probably submit it soon to MESS svn, right after some more meat has been added to the bones (e.g. inputs and rtc), to be sure the code is not lost if my macbook decides to self-destroy itself.

[1] NEC PC-8201 might be a simple drop in, if a dump of the BIOS surfaces…