I'm so glad to see you back in business after the move. MSX is an under-served retro architecture, so thanks for covering it as well as you do.

Welcome to your PCB journey & enjoy it!👍

Congratulations Noel. Specially getting this for all the SVI 328 people there.

@16:57 "Putting the 'cart' before the horse" Pun intended? Great video Noel! Have missed your videos so much. Well done on the cart. 2 computers in 1.

16:56 - Putting the "cart" before the horse!

Wonderful job! Impressive to see the SVI-328 loading MSX games!

Noel! It's great to see you designing a PCB! You're surely more than capable of tackling fairly complex electronics designs, even if you fall into one or another trap now and then, which is practically impossible to avoid and will be the most valuable learning experiences. So don't get discouraged when that happens. I very much look forward to seeing what you'll come up with next!

Putting the "Cart" before the Horse.. I see what you did there, Noel ;)

Congrats on your first pcb design! 🎉 The anxiety of receiving it, assemble it and wait for it to work is completely compensated by the joy and sense of pride when it finally works. I know you’ll end up creating wonderful things. Cheers!

Isn't it amazing that we as hobbyists can now design and print cases and order our own boards, I would have loved that so much when I was 12. :)

Thanks for covering the MSX, a largely unknown standard in English speaking countries, very underrated in general.

Let me congratulate you on your first board. I remember how excited I was for my first board way back in 2021. After your first working board, you're going to start designing solutions to every problem you see.

So glad to see you back my friend, hope you are ok and your moving from Spain to the US is done. So I am pretty sure we can expect more videos to come in the future :-) Michael...

Nice work, Noel!

Great to see PCB design especially using KiCAD which makes designs immediately accessible to everybody!

PCBWay is complaining about the missing drill files using the order link. Thanks for licensing this as MIT.

I remember Sorcery needed a poke to run properly on my Sony Hit Bit MSX. It was because it had an extra rom with built in software. I remember this because I was disappointed it would not work and wrote a letter about it to MSX Computing Magazine who published the letter and gave the poke in the reply.

Glad to see you back, Noel!

Great video Noel, good to have you back! If it wasn't for you I wouldn't even know the SVI-328 existed, let alone have such an in-depth understanding of its inner workings so these videos are fascinating to me. 👍

Great that you are back online! And interesting video, too!

Congratulations Noel! The first small board design a great success on the first try! Layout CAD software is definitely a mountain in the beginning... :) Bravo! 👌👍🖖

Ohh so excited about that multi cartridge with sd and screen!! Looking forward to it !!

What a cool cartridge and a nicely done remake Noel 😊

What a cool project! Glad it worked out. Thanks for sharing.

Glad you make it work! Multicard for Spectravideo 3X8 machines would be awesome.

Good to see you again Noel. This is a very interesting project. If I owned an SVI 328 I would love one of those. Interesting your new lab looks just the same as the old one.

Good stuff! I'm looking forward to those new expansions for the Amstrad CPC line. It's great to have you back, Noel!

We all are missing of you and your excellent content. Thanks for coming back!

You did a great job! I'm glad that you shared your project in GitHub. Thank you!

Yey - you made a PCB! It is a great feeling and one of the reasons I'm big into Retro as it feels a bit more forgiving and a bit easier to wrap your head around the tech than more modern stuff - plus it makes my 10 year old self very happy, it's something that I used to think was kind-of magic! I made my first PCB during lockdown - it's full of BIG mistakes - but it worked, which was such a buzz (made a ZX +2A into a +3). I'm really looking forward to your future projects and seeing what you do, congrats again!

The return of the King! I need to get an SVI-328, so I can use this!

I used to love the Toshiba MSX and MSX2 - it was ahead of the rest!

Since the small size EPROM faking away, combing them into bigger (E)EPROM and make a new PCB for all the retro-computer will be fun and also help the late starters in the community.

If you want an english welcome screen version, you could replace the "Bienvenido al..." and "Compatible MSX..." messages, just by editing the binary file and searching for that alphanumeric strings, as you may know already. Just keep the same lenght of the strings so code do not get corrupted.

Really interesting to do this with a cartridge. I still have a boxed SVI-328 MK II here. Also still have a boxed SVI-606 official MSX emulator for the SVI-328 (as well as the SVI-603 ColecoVision emulator).

great video. I am very excited to see what you have in store for pcb design!

Congrats on the PCB! I am also a PCB newbie, but this has inspired me to make my first one! Keep on rockin'!

I look forward to any Amstrad PC expansion boards for future videos.

Thank you for this nice video. I'm very happy to see you back I now waiting for you to make a full Amstrad cpc 6128 design ! 🤣

I was just thinking, "I know he's busy getting settled but I wonder if Noel will post something soon." Good to see you again!

I totally understand your excitement. I went this road in 2017, when I had purchased ZX Spectrum Plus (which I never had - I was the Atari 800XL tribe in the 80'). Then I discovered the Spanish project of "Supercart" for the ZX, with the capacity of 4Mbit - place for a dozen of games to be loaded. It is called something like "dirrea" to describe the innovative algorithm of timing the bank switching while the program image gets pushed to the RAM, to get whole 48kB written with the sliding window. Then I obtained flash eeproms in the PLCC package instead the DIP one and had to design the whole PCB from the scratch, to accommodate the change. So I learnt Kicad, went through the whole process of component -to-package matching, especially for the ZX edge connector, then I created my first double sided board. The only change was i used JLC PCB, but they are equally good. My cartridges wait peacefully in the drawer for the time to be finished however, other projects overwhelmed it.

Great Job. Keep the excellent content coming. Seeing the joy from you putting things like this together is great to watch. 👍

Satisfaction. And very entertaining to watch. Nice one Noel.

Fantastic Noel. I am really surprised how well this worked, and it’s great that you’ve managed to make a new one. It makes me me think that maybe even that MSX-SVI converter cassette on eBay might even be effective. I think that multi-rom cart you mention has to be the first priority with your new-found skills, it’s what the system is missing and I suspect every SVI owner out there would invest in one (not that that’s your motivation but it’s a practical consideration 🙂), I know I’ve dreamt of such a thing for years.

Noel's back! Woohoo!

Nicely done.

Good tip about edge connector solder mask. Would not have though of that.

nice stuff Noel!.. great job on the cart design, and the reuse of the atari case is brilliant!.. good job!.. cant wait to see some CPC addons! :P

Ola Noel! It's good to see you again :)

OK, MSX is absolutely alien thing for me but it was a lot of fun watching this video! And I'm very glad to see you back!

Great to have you back, Noel. I'm now on a MSX frenzy, trying to get back my game and program collection from my past, and this is a very interesting topic. I have a friend with a SVI-328 willing to get rid of it, and I think I will get it and try your cartridge, just for fun! :)

Great work!

Excelent job, Noel.

Well done Noel!

Great video, as always!

Wonderful to have you back, Noel!

Believe it or not I been waiting for your next video for a while, I would check every couple of weeks to see if I missed any update. Its always a treat to watch one of this, is the perfect mix between learning and visual ASMR when it comes to soldering skills.

Very cool noel cant wait to see version 2 :D

Retro computing and modern manufacturing and prototyping services. A perfect match. This sort of thing people wouldn't have even dreamed of in the 80s it would have seemed impossible. Our modern computers may not have the charm of retro systems but the things they let us do really is incredible

Welcome back!

Just for the Fun of it, you can also easily make a perfect CBM clone from a C64 and visa versa. Ok, some Low Level Registers won't be fully compatible but hell you can get VERY close to a perfect clone. Making a C64 somewhat compatible to PET/CBM only requires a couple of POKEs to move stuff around. Loading a slightly modified CBM Kernal makes it extermely compatible and adding some CBM-Hardware through the expansion port makes the C64 perfectly compatible. The other way is a bit harder to do and you always need some hardware modification. In 1983 I read an article in m'c magazine about how to rewire a CBM3032 so it has the same memory layout as a C64 - BUT ONLY 32kByte of Memory, leaving 30719 Bytes to Basic. As I said, only rewiring some cables and replacing the ROMs with patched C64 ROMs. Doing the same for a Plus4 or CBM264/364/500/600/700 is harder but still pretty straight forward. I once saw a CBM700 (?) rewired to be a fully compatible C64 but still including its 8088-Board to run MSDOS 1.x. Pretty amazing.

An impeccable job! Great!

I am a IPC certified pcb designer with about 20 years under my belt and I still get a thrill of opening that pack of PCB's that only existed in drawings beforehand

Here is something I repeat to every intern in my company, as I was told by more experienced engineer in a previous one: Layout is usually a matter of taste. Most designers exercise their own feng shui, but in the end most designs would work anyway. Most newbie designs come close to the limits of what would work, and only by approaching these limits you learn what is acceptable and why. For example, I had to set on fire a prototype of a medical instrument just to learn the importance of via diameter. ;) Good luck with your future projects.

Welcome back here ^_^

I'm so glad you are posting videos again. Everyone does Commodores. Nothing wrong with that, I dig the 64 and 128, and have them now. But I grew up on an SVI-328, and a 738 MSX after that. I've got the MSX covered, and am aware of the tape replacement devices. I just might build the cartridge you showed here, but now I'm wondering if there is a disk drive emulator, or anything like that, for the original pre-MSX Spectravideos... Going to google it, didn't even think of it before...

Very interesting video and glad to see you back. Any chance of a ram expansion project for the Amstrad CPC 464?

Really nice PCB design and build! :)

If only those poor SpectraVideo Computer owners had this cartridge in the early '80's, then they would not have felt so alone and left behind. The Hong Kong SpectraVideo moved on quickly towards MSX, dumping all of their loyal customers that were so foolish to buy these pre-MSX computers.

I always wanted to make the little card to allow a PC floppy disc drive to be used on an Amiga. It would plug into the drive cable socket and have a header for the cable to Amiga. In my head it should be simple because to hack the drive itself is usually cut a trace, short a trace etc. So to answer your question PC floppy drive to Amiga in line board .

Very well done on the cartridge build ;)

Wow! It's been while since your last upload! Great way to make a comeback! Congratulations on getting your first design right the first time! One day I'll get to som eof mine and hope I have the same luck as you did!

I'd be glad to see some RPi Pico (RP2040) based multi cartridge designs, and maybe also some SCSI/ACSI disk emulators. RP2040 seems to be perfect for these tasks, with its auxiliary PIO state machines.

He is back! Awesome video 👏 Congrats on your first PCB, you did great! It can be really stressful. I am often worried about finding a hardware bug right after ordering the PCB, while it's still being manufactured, not even received haha

20:42 few buttons and small oled screen would be a nice beginning on doing such cartridge, but greater idea would be menu driven directly of target machine. I imagine this as a very small "bootstrap loader" with native to the platfrom program allowing to choose one of the images (perhaps with one big EPROM file containing few images aligned to some round number, allowing to simple switch between them with latch driven "mapper"?). This way, you'll insert cartridge as usual and would be greeted with "choose what to play today" message followed by possible selections list :)

Long time no see.

Glad you're back, Noel! Ah, you make everything look easy.... I would have burnt my fingers and probably the computer XD

Great video, good to see you have created your 1st PCB. I have ordered some to try out, as I have almost finished a few new games, and would like them all to be available for original Spectravideo owners as well (only expect small quanities of course). I local friend has done some shell prints for me, that came out very well.

i am sure i had a MSX emulator running from Disk or Tape at my SVI328 back in the 80s, I guess it would emulate a 32k MSX since the Emulator itself was using some memory too. I did not support diskdrives as i recall.

Don't listen to people that tell you not to use auto routing. It can save you so much time, especially when your designs become more and more complex. Try FreeRouting with Kicad. When set up correctly it works great. It makes PCB design so much easier when you can make edits and adjustments to the component layout and easily just re-rout the board. It is like a compiler for writing code. Yes you could do better writing everything in assembler but that is so much more time consuming, just compile it and make better use of your time.

You should go all the way and make it into a true converter by adding an MSX cartridge slot on the top!

Question for anybody - I totally don't know anything about this. Why does it seem to have a solder point for another connector on the board? As for you Noel, you make this look a lot easier than it is. A long time ago, we had to do this photographically and it sucked. Thanks for the great video!

It's a good idea to have the solder mask cover the edge connectors sliiightly , instead of having a tiny bit of thin trace completely exposed.

speaking about project I hedd GeOS rambank with batterybackup combined with a dallas clock modul in my C64, started faster then any computer i ever played with, wish i had kept it...

Great video, good to see you back! One question, with the MSX cartridges being a different size and having a different connector, would it be feasible to put a suitable socket on the top of an expanded version of the cartridge you made? Then again, if the ROM images are all freely available it's probably not worth the effort, and your idea at the end for a multi-cart system with OLED screen makes much more sense! A Noel-tek or Go-Noel perhaps?!!!!

Now a sticker to round it up.

great video its nice you can recreate a modern version of something cool like that

I’m sure you could sell quite a few of these for Spectravideo users. That multicart sounds promising.

Really confused why people would suggest skipping the assisted track layout tool, it's one of the most powerful features IMHO. I've used several EDA packages over the years and KiCAD is very impressive due to that feature. I prefer gEDA for some work, but being able to fly through the layout process without manually measuring to maintain design rules is such a critical function, having it flow traces around and shove them aside really accelerates the layout process.

Nice to see you again, Noel! Hope the move is going okay. 😃

I didn't get a good look at the connector; did you use chamfered edges? I've heard that it's good for reducing wear on the socket. If you figure out how to design that I'd be interested in learning about it :)

Fantastic video. I like it very much. And I like your CAS or WAV or MP3 player. What model is ?

Always interesting and well presented. Thank you. Ah, PCB design: BITD I learned the frankly horrible Eagle because being the industry standard doing so helped with premade parts, etc. However Eagle is becoming less popular with hobbyists now more friendly alternates are available - such a shame conversion tools generally fall between poor and non-existent. Bah! PS GerberLogix is an exceptionally useful tool for reviewing your files prior to going to a fabrication house - it needs to be registered but is a free download. PPS While there's nothing wrong with the more well known fabrication services used by hobbyists, Seeed Studio is worth a mention - good quality, dirt cheap. PPPS FWIW: Using auto routing is indeed generally frowned upon, but I'm lazy. My usual process: 0) Lay out the physical dimensions of your PCB along with any carefully positioned holes, cut-outs, and connectors before anything else! 1) Lay out your design as pleasantly as you can (there is a little art to PCB design) taking care to minimise track length and crossing. 2) Lay in your power and ground lines as logically and neatly as you can, preferably on opposite sides of the board if it's a 2 layer design. (try to run thicker traces for these lines, I usually lay a power and GND loop around the periphery of their respective sides on a two layer board)* 3) Don't forget those decoupling caps! As a rule of thumb one 100nF ceramic for each IC and one 4.7-47uF electrolytic for the power input. 4) Life's too short so set the software to auto route everything else, followed by careful checking and editing of the more obvious stupidity. 5) *Finish with a fill on both sides of the board, each connected to it's respective power and GND assuming you laid your lines out like that. (IMO: It looks better. It also helps power distribution, adds a little general decoupling, reduces line noise, and helps tie both sides together) 6) Don't forget to validate your hopefully final layout - unconnected and unintentionally crossed lines are a very common thing! 7) Carefully recheck everything again and again. It's really annoying when you have to cut traces and add bodge wires to your new PCBs. 8) For God's sake use the silk screen layers to: -Label all components properly as an absolute minimum!!! -Designer, date, revision, and intended function -How and where to fit along with orientation markings -Basic instructions where there is room ...your design may last longer than you and certainly longer than your memory. Finding this stuff written on the PCB will be a godsend in the future.

Kudos to you Noel! I'm glad you are again doing your interesting videos. And this is by sure one of them! Only a question... Why don't try to include in the future circuit n MSX cartridge adapter? Additionally, but more difficult to achieve, is the inclusion of the MSX memory mapper to ensure at least full compatibility with all the MSX cartridges. If this can be done, it can be combined with one of these F18A VDP that are enhancing the old MSX, Coleco consoles and Ti99 computers and the SVI328 will be more powerful... And why not adding additional RAM to the system? ;-)

Hi Noel. Long time no see :) I don't create PCBs anymore but, when I did, I used the autorouter functions just as a start point. Autorouters really are not the best solution but also there are a lot a "purists" out there as well that say that anything auto = evil. When you're dealing with simple digital electronics they are usually fine and can help speed up the process a lot.

Needs a custom label!

Te echábamos de menos.

Nice to see you again Noel, you have been missed! The lab looks pretty much the same, is this an old video shot in Spain before you moved to the USA?

nice job :D

Nice. How about a 3D design of the cartridge shell with a removable or openable "mini door", so you can check/remove the chips/ROM without using a screw driver?