Microbee CGA to VGA upscaler on Amiga 1000

Today I wanted to take a look at the Microbee CGA to VGA upscaler, which is able to be used on the Amiga to scan double and de-interlace the Amiga native RGB output to a modern TFT screen.

I must first apologise for the lateness in blog posts. I have been very busy with my new job, which I started recently. I have also been distracted by other projects and training I am working on that are not Amiga related to keep learning new IT skills.

However, last week I received notification from Facebook that Microbee finally had stock of their upscaler devices, (HDMI or VGA output) which are compatible with Amiga's too.

Normally these units sell out VERY quickly and I have missed out multiple times in the past, so I quickly jumped on their website to grab a VGA version (AUD$129), and the optional Amiga RGB to CGA cable (AUD$22).

It arrived in the post the other day, and after the usual heavy cleaning due to COVID-19, I could use it.

I bought this device for use on my Amiga 1000. It is the only Amiga I own without a scan doubler installed. The indivision ECS doesn't fit in the A1000 due to the daughterboard on top.

Until now I have been using a 15khz compatible TFT screen with the Amiga 1000, connected to a AmiVGA connector to the RGB port.

Problem with this is mainly that interlace modes don't look good, and the fixed resolution on a 16:9 screen looks a bit funny, with some screen artefacts (lines) that make it less than optimal.

Enter the Microbee upscaler. Microbee is an interesting company, having made the local Australian built Microbee computers in the 1980's which were used in schools and homes too. I used one myself in computer classes in the 1980's in Perth.

I remember learning LOGO on the Microbee computers. I also remember that they were networked to a master "server", which would routinely crash when too many people were using the Microbee computers simultaneously...usually just before you finished typing a long amount of code to run.

I never owned a Microbee myself sadly. The company these days makes this Upscaler to enable the Microbee computer to be displayed on a TFT screen (CGA to VGA). To make it appeal to a broader market they made an Amiga RGB to CGA cable and tweaked the settings to make it work with the Amiga (and other systems like Commodore 128, etc).

Close up of the Amiga cable - it uses a real DB23 connector, not a shaved 25 pin one, which is great:

Pin outs for the RGB to CGA cable were included. Fortunately they build the cable for you nowadays rather than having to make it yourself (which you used to have to do).

On the front of the unit is the Analog/Digital switch and the CGA input port.

On the back is the VGA port and power input (power adapter is included) to power the unit.

I set to work connecting up the cables to the Amiga 1000.

The Amiga cable is very short, so the upscaler unit needs to be close the Amiga 1000 RGB port.

With it all hooked up, time to test it. On power on, I get the ACA500 boot screen (as I have an ACA500 attached to the Zorro port on the A1000). You can see some blue display garbage at the bottom of the screen, but otherwise looks nice:

I adjusted the screen settings on my Viewsonic TFT 19" screen to move the display down a bit to remove the blue bit from view and have a nice clear scan doubled Amiga display:

I booted up my Amiga Workbench 1.3 from CF hard disk:

The Standard Amiga lores screen works great, although I should mention that there is still some screen artifacting on closer inspection in demos and games. I used a demo "Interference" from Sanity to show this - the purple edging has some artifacting:

So, well, it is not perfect. But it is not too bad. Compared to some of my other very old scan doublers, this looks much better! Especially when using the Workbench and applications.

The artifacting is much less noticeable on black backgrounds:

Next I fired up Deluxe Paint IV to test Hi-Res and Interlace modes - Hi-Res first:

The output is crisp and looks quite nice actually:

I tested interlace next and it displays very nicely with no flicker visible:

When using the normal workbench 1.3 with mouse pointer, I noticed some strange "watery artifacts around the mouse when moving. Not really annoying, but noticeable.

I am not sure if there is much you can do to optimise this (I assume the serial cable allows connection to the board inside to customise it), but it is ok for normal use and I haven't played with the board setup at all. Strictly tested as it was delivered to me.

I fired up some more demos that I know use some weird screen tricks (like Wild Copper) and it works well:

I also tested a game - APB - and with this game you can really see the artifacting up close with a purple backdrop. This is a shame as it kinda ruins things a bit:

In short, the Microbee upscaler is good, but not perfect for the Amiga 1000. When I have some more time I will try to use it on some other Amigas as well to confirm if the issues I saw are Amiga 1000 specific or not. For now I will keep using it on the A1000 as it looks nicer than using a 16:9 screen and interlace works well.

Adelaide Retro Computing Meeting September 2016

Today I am covering the September 2016 Adelaide Retro Computing group meeting with an Amiga theme. For this meeting we had special guests Trevor Dickinson from A-EON Technology and Robert Bernardo from Fresno Commodore Users Group fly in especially for the event!

I didn't know we picked the same t-shirt to wear for the night! heh.

Before the meeting I met up with Trevor (freshly flown in from NZ) and took him to Rundle Mall to grab a bite to eat. Rundle Mall is the main shopping district in the Adelaide CBD.

Here is Trevor in Rundle Mall, standing next to the iconic Spheres (commonly used as a meeting point and known locally as the balls):

We then made our way to the meeting venue. As we were a bit later than usual, George and Theo from the group committee helped out a bit earlier with the table setups ahead of our arrival. I then had to quickly assemble a very large array of Amiga stuff I brought for the meeting!

I decided to bring an AmigaOne X1000, AmigaOne A1222 (Tabor), MIST FPGA (Minimig AGA), and a CD32 with the brand new Classic Amiga CD32 game called Reshoot I received this week - doesn't get much newer than that!

It took a long time for me to set up, everything before the attendees arrived, but Trevor was very keen to start using the systems once I did!

Also pictured in front is the A.L.I.C.E laptop that Trevor brought along especially for the meeting, but more on that a little later:

I first met Trevor at AmiWest 2014, and it was fantastic to have him here in Adelaide to enjoy our Amiga themed meeting this month!

Trevor also brought in and distributed these interesting Boing Ball recycled page notebooks at the meeting! Thanks for these - I am sure our attendees are as glad to have them as I am! :-)

As mentioned Robert Bernardo from the Fresno Commodore Users Group also flew in from the USA to be here - he is also attending the Melbourne Amiga user Group and Sydney Amiga User Group events while he is here.

Here is Robert together at the meeting with a keen attendee running her own business called JMV Grafix, who produces documentation and graphics for Geos and the Commodore 64 for sale:

Here is an example book from JMV Grafix , which were available for purchase on the night:

Given the Amiga theme for tonight's event, we had no shortage of Amiga systems on display, both Classic and Next Generation. Here is a rare A500 Plus model with memory expansion and internal cpu mounted hard disk expansion - very rare to see one of these Amiga 500 Plus machines in Australia:

Here is the Amiga 500 Plus running Brilliance:

Aron brought along his trusty Amiga 600 along with doing his usual soldering table duties (thanks for this Aron!). The Amiga 600 was running very nicely indeed with wireless internet access via a PCMCIA wireless adapter card.

Running not so nicely and receiving attention from Aron during the evening was this Amiga 2000HD system that was brought in:

Here is another Amiga 2000 brought in on the night, with the case removed - this system has a SCSI HD internally installed:

Mick brought in his NG Amiga - a Sam 440-flex system running AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition:

Mick works on and contributes lots of Amiga OS4 software ports, and so he is quite active in the NG Amiga community.

Here he is with Trevor:

Next up was this very cool expanded Amiga 600 system with built in CD drive!

This Amiga 600 has a ACA620 accelerator installed, as well as a special modified laptop power supply, which bypasses the need to use a normal brick power supply.

The star of the machine for me though was the built in slot load CD drive - there is so little space inside a A600 to squeeze it in but here it is:

In addition to my own CD32, someone else also brought in a boxed CD32 and CRT TV: - here running the Alien Breed/Qwak game CD:

Of course we also had other system too, for example this older PC laptop running Amiga emulation was brought in:

A signed Commodore 64 was also in display:

On the Commodore 64, a company called RGCD is continuing to produce new games on cartridge for the Commodore 64 in 2016 - here is Bomberland which was brought in to display at the meeting:

Theo brought in this Altair system:

Also interesting was this Intel SDK-85 system, displayed at the event:

The system Intel was then powered on to show it does actually still work:

The event was well attended, and people quickly got chatting about all things Amiga and Retro computing!

As this was the first time an AmigaOne A1222 had been displayed in Australia, Trevor was keen for people to see the system is a very capable system - it was busy running Amiga emulation, productivity apps and games too!

Trevor seemed a little jealous of my progress in Super Tux Kart.. :-)

Some interesting Commodore 16 systems and music making hardware for the C16/64 was also brought in:

George brought in his SX64 portable system to try the music making software and CMK-49 hardware out, with Robert involved too:

We then started out main presentation for the evening, with Trevor Dickinson covering A-EON Technology's current projects for Next Generation and Classic Amiga in 2016:

Needless to say we were all fascinating to here all about what A-EON Technology is working on:

One of the projects A-EON Technology is working on is the A.L.I.C.E laptop, which is A Laptop Incorporating a Classic amiga Experience. It runs on a standard Acer x86 laptop, and can run the Classic Amiga, AmigaOS 4.1 Classic experiences alongside your normal Windows or Linux installations.

It can also run linux applications in a way (called Rabbit Hole) that integrates with the Classic Amiga setup, which is running AmiKit X.  Here trevor is using Libre Office running on the Classic Amiga environment for the notes he is using during the presentation.

After his presentation was finished, he kindly fielded questions from the attendees for quite a while, covering topics from Classic Amiga add ons like the Prisma megamix, where he explained the technical software development reasons for the delay of shipping this product (which makes perfect sense), and where A-EON is at with the AmigaOne X5000 and A1222.

He even hinted at some future projects that he didn't expand on, but needless to say they are committed to the NG and Classic amiga platforms in 2016 and beyond. It is wonderful to have new systems and software being produced by them!

It was a great presentation and we are very grateful to Trevor for taking the time for fly in especially for our event!

Let's take a closer look at the A.L.I.C.E system Trevor brought in. Here is the boot menu where you can select from Windows, Ubuntu Mate Linux, Classic Amiga (Amikit X) and AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition Classic environments to boot from:

As you can see the AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition Classic environment is actually running under FS-UAE on a linux distribution that boots directly into the environment from power on (you can press F12 to see the FS-UAE control options while it is running):

Next, I tried booting it into the AmiKit X environment, which is a highly customised AmigaOS 3.1 build with the new Rabbit Hole functionality:

With the Rabbit hole functionality, you can launch linux applications like Libre Office, Firefox, Skype, VLC, etc, all from within the Classic Amiga environment, and they integrate seamlessly with it:

Here is Libre Office running within the AmiKit X environment:

It was snappy and performed well while I was mucking around with it.

This is an exciting development, as it means we will be able to buy a standard laptop that can run other normal day to day computing needs in 2016, but can function as a Classic Amiga while doing it! Exciting indeed, and I look forward to when we are able to buy one!

Moving back to the meeting itself, my NG Amiga table setup was getting quite the workout by this time, with brand new AmigaOS 4.1 game Amiga Racer with my requested Australian Holden Commodore HSV car being raced quite a lot on the night!

I also had Tanks Furry, Wings Battlefield, Reshoot, Amiga Racer game boxes and games running on the night:

My AmigaOne A1222 got plenty of looks and plenty of questions  to me and Trevor about it during the evening:

I covered the case and build of the AmigaOne A1222 extensively in this blog - this entry about the A1222 in the new case is worth checking out for the people (and there were many) that loved the case I put it in and wanted to know where to get it.

Also pointed out to me from one of the guys who made them originally, was this 3.5 inch external floppy drive made in Adelaide for the Classic Amiga:

Never actually seen one of these drives myself before, so I was glad to see it tonight!

 The second hand tables were doing good business as usual:

It was great to see the kids really enjoying playing new games on the AmigaOne X1000 - here they are playing Voxelnoid:

Here is Trevor and George chatting about A-EON's current and future plans:

It was a truly great evening and I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who came to the event and especially to our special guests Trevor and Robert!

I had a great time and I am really looking forward to the next meeting!