AgonLight2 the fastest Z80 retro computer development is remarkable

AgonLight2 is incredible small Z80 based retro computer which has 512KB of RAM, VGA display and PS2 Keyboard. The AgonLight2 community just in Facebook is over 1700 people.

For all beginners The Agon FAQ covers all most common questions asked in the FaceBook page.

The Agon Light Wiki is the official source for all documentation regarding the Agon Quark firmware and any third-party software development.

There is great tools and games developed during the last year. Here I will point to some:

Text editors:

• AED: Another Text Editor – Another Text Editor.
• nano – Editor with nano-style key bindings.
• Vi – Vi for the Agon series of eZ80 computers.

Programming languages:

• AgDev – Port to Agon Light of TI-84-CE C/C++ Toolchain which uses LLVM and generates eZ80 ADL code.
• agon-ez80asm – ez80 assembler, running natively on the Agon platform.
• Agon Forth – Forth for Agon computer.
• BBC Basic – Official AGON QUARK Firmware: BASIC Interpreter.
• BBC Basic ADL – Official AGON QUARK Firmware: BASIC Interpreter (ADL version).
• Turbo Rascal Syntax Error – TRSE is a complete suite (IDE, compiler, programming language, resource editor) intended for developing games/demos for 8 / 16-bit line of computers.
• Z88DK – The Development Kit for Z80 Computers.

Operating systems:

• CP/M 2.2 for Agon Light – CP/M 2.2 port for Agon Light that didn’t require custom firmware. Use your Agon fully and have access to CP/M system.
• TRS-OS for Agon Light – A bootstrap to run TRS-OS on Agon Light under MOS. TRS-OS is an eZ80 port of the LS-DOS TRS-80 operating system. No firmware change required.
• Zeal-8-bit-OS for Agon Light – A bootstrap to run Zeal 8-bit on the Agon Light under MOS. No firmware change required.

Games:

• AgonLight Game Library – Games for the BBC Micro and Electron converted for AgonLight.
• Agon Light Invaders – Invaders for the Agon Light.
• Dans la prison hantée – This prison is haunted. But this prison also hides a treasure. And finding treasures is your job.
• Diamond Quest – eZ80 game on AgonLight. A simple game, built purely as a goal to learn z80 assembly routines on the Agon Light.
• Draegerman – Draegerman for Agon Light.
• Drug Wars – An adaption of the DOS version of the game, converted to BBC BASIC (Z80) for the Agon Light.
• Escape the Mansion – Multi-room graphical adventure.
• Game of Life – Conway’s Game of Life for the Agon Light.
• Haunted_House – Agon Light2 Text Adventure Game, written in BBC BASIC.
• Haunted House III – Haunted House Text Adventure Game for the Agon Light2.
• Lunar Lander – Lunar Lander Game.
• Pitman – Port of Pitman, written in BBC BASIC.
• Realm – An adventure game for Agon Light.
• Rokky – Dungeons and Diamonds game for Agon Light.
• Sargon Chess – Port of the award-winning Sargon Chess program by Dan and Kathe Spracklen from 1978.
• Sokoban – A custom port of the Sokoban game for the Agon platform.
• Space Birds – A simple game written in C for the Agon Light retro computer.
• The Valley – Agon Light conversion of The Valley adventure game.
• TINACOT – An original game inspired by tower defense games and Tetris.
• Vezza – Vezza is a tool for running Infocom compatible (Z-machine) text adventure games.
• Wizard’s Castle – The Wizard’s castle modded for BBC Basic on the Agon Light.

Connectivity:

• Snail – Fast gopher browser for Agon Light (and Agon Light 2)

Music:

• Agon MOD – Agon .MOD tracker.

Utility:

• agon_64cfontloader – Load .64c fonts on the Agon in BBC BASIC.
• Agon Basic Header – Agon Light 2 Basic Header.
• Agon Bootlogo – Assembler MOSlet bootlogo of the Basic Header.
• Agon Flash – Agon firmware update utility.
• Agon Hex – Agon hex editor.
• Agon Light 2 Serial Printer – Mini Thermal Receipt Printer (Serial RxD).
• Agon Utilities – MOS utilities for Agon: copy, view, editor…
• Agon Utils – Utilities for the Agon Light computer.
• calc24 – 24 bit integer calculations in both hex and decimal.
• Console8 Recover – Console8 MOS recover utility.
• HEXLOAD utility – Utility for the Agon platform, to load Intel HEX files over one of its serial ports.
• More Agon Utilities – MOS utilities including gunzip, hexdump tools for interactive navigation of file or memory, strings to extract strings from a binary file

Olimex’s soldering workshop in Burgas tomorrow!

Following the successful soldering workshop at TuxCon our next one will be tomorrow in Burgas.

Who can participate?

This is charity soldering workshop, we do this to spark the interest for electronics in kids and juniors.

What does it cost?

Nothing – just come and we will teach you how to solder your first board 🙂 At the end of the workshop you will take with you the soldered board – small metal detector.

The number of kits are limited to 30 so please reserve yours here.

Where will it be?

Burgas – Flora center Sea Garden.

What o’clock it starts?

The workshop will start from 12.30 and will be up to 16.00

Special thanks to Valyo Rusaliyski for the organization of this event!

AgonLight Week Programming Challenge – ISSUE 3

Here we go to the Third issue of the AgonLight programming challenge.

This time taking into the account the feedback we got from Facebook we will extend it to be 1 week long, not just weekend!

So rules are changed:

What is WPC?

It’s a small coding challenge that you have to solve for 1 week from Friday 2nd of June to Thursday 8th of June!.

Who can participate?

Anyone can participate except Olimex employees. You can submit the solutions under your name or anonymously under an alias name.

What are the rules?

The code must run on AgonLight. There are no restriction how you will code your solution: Assembler, Forth, C, BBC Basic, Turbo Pascal for CP/M any tool is possible. If your tool need special installation you should provide brief note how to do it so we can verify your solution.
There is no restriction to re-use code found on internet and adopt it for AgonLight2 as far the code is working and doing the job!
The solutions should be sent to info at olimex dot com. You will receive notification email that the solution is received.

On next Friday 9th of June, we will push all solutions received to a special GitHub repository and announce the winner on Monday 12th of June, who will receive a €50 voucher to use in the Olimex web shop. The jury will consist of Tsvetan Usunov and Bernardo Kastrup.

So z80 retro ninja coders here is the third challenge for you!

Make Snake game for AgonLight in the next 7 days!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_(video_game_genre)

Good Luck!

UPDATE: 2023-06-09

The solutions are uploaded on GitHub

UPDATE: 2023-06-12

There are two solutions which are equally good and fun to play: #4 and #8 and as we like them both we decided that this time we will have two winners: Lennart Benschop and Greg Dyke, they both will receive €50 vouchers!

Donald Knuth’s MIX computer implemented in iCE40HX8K-EVB

Donald Knuth’s “The Art of Computer Programming” is still a popular monograph which covers many types of programming algorithms and their analysis.

Although the first publishing was back in 1968, the book has been updated many times and is still a good source for learning algorithms.

Inside the book Knuth uses a hypothetical computer named MIX for writing all of his algorithms. The MIX computer has 9 registers and about 70 machine instructions.

Today in our Project section we got a submission of a MIX computer implementation on iCE40HX8K-EVB by Michael Schroeder.

The project is hosted on Gitlab:

https://gitlab.com/x653/mix-fpga

Several examples were created to demonstrate the MIX implementation such as generating the first 500 prime numbers.

The project is well documented and includes a manual: https://gitlab.com/x653/mix-fpga/-/raw/master/manual.pdf

Thanks Michael for the nice project!

Let the RP2040-PICO-PC fun begin!

This is update to our previous post about RP2040-PICO.

We have had the RP2040-PICO-PC prototypes for more than week and have tested all of its peripherals.

It’s amazing what amount of code the Raspberry Pi community generated for such a short time after the launch of RP2040-PICO.

Video, USB keyboard, SD-card storage, Audio, all tested and working. Sure, we did need a few wire patches but hey this is Revision A after all 🙂

What you see above is the RP2040-PICO-PC running from a LiPo battery and moving two sprites on the screen with quite a decent speed!

Code taken from https://github.com/Wren6991/PicoDVI

A small All-in-one pocket computer which can run from a LiPo battery.

Programmable with Python, with video, audio and keyboard.

Perfect tool to teach kids how to make their first Python games. Or just to emulate BBC micro and play all good old games.

Now RP2040-PICO-PC is ready for production!

TuxCon 2019 is this weekend in Plovdiv

This weekend we are looking forward to welcome you at TuxCon 2019, the Open Source Hardware and Software conference in Plovdiv.

In Saturday we will be in Technical University (ul. Tzanko Dustabanov 25) in Halls “Dennis Ritchie” and “Bjarne Stroustrup”. There will be total 16 talks split in both hall. The event starts 10.30 o’clock, see the program here. At the end of the day there will be Quiz with many prizes, some of them will be Olimex boards.

In Sunday we will be in Olimex trainig building starting 11.00 o’clock. We will have traditional soldering workshop for both total beginners and people with experience who want to polish SMT soldering. It’s good if you have your own soldering iron to bring it with you as we have limited numbers of soldering irons for the workshop.

OpenFest 2018, LoRa technology and OSHW

First OpenFest was back in 2003, so this year this open source technology event had 15 years anniversary! As always it was nice place to see and talk to interesting people.

Vasil Kolev opened with nice retrospection on how the event started, the challenges to make it (OpenFest is one of the few events which builds all infrastructure, video, networking etc by the organizers and do not use external service providers) and how it evolved in the years to become the most popular open source event in Bulgaria.

Since 2011 Olimex was making traditional soldering workshop on every OpenFest. Lot of people held soldering iron for a very first time at these workshops, many of them got interested and continued with hardware. One of these guys is Leon Anavi, who got very commited to Open Source Hardware and start releasing his own boards! This year Leon, who is also the major motor behind Tuxcon conference in Plovdiv made the Soldering Workshop at Openfest!

All the lecture videos will be uploaded soon at OpenFest.org.

My slides are already at Slideshare

 

 

Open Source / Free Software for Effective Industry 4.0 Meetup by Nexedi GmbH and Fraunhofer IAO on November 12th, 2018 in Stuttgart with Amarisoft, Linutronix, Olimex and Télécom ParisTech

On 12th of November in Stuttgart at Fraunhofer IAO (Nobelstraße 12, 70569 Stuttgart, GERMANY) will be held “Open Source / Free Software for Effective Industry 4.0 Meetup”  organized by Nexedi GmbH and hosted by Fraunhofer IAO.

Olimex will present there Open Hardware solutions for Industrial Automation.

 

 

New products in stock: ESD proof PCB panel holders

When you deal with PCB assembly you need to move PCBs or panels through different operations like AOI, Test etc. To move the PCBs you need ESD proof, strong and reliable PCB holders. Most of the PCB Holders on the marked are made by plastic, which scratch, bend when placed in dry oven and so on. We have designed three types of PCB Holders which we use in our own production and now offer for sale.

PCB-HOLDER-6 can hold up to 39 PCB/Panels they are spaced at 10 mm. The Holder is with total size 400x120mm and there are two wings which hold the PCBs and are 20mm high so you can easily slide your fingers under the Holder and lift it easily:

We have one bigger size PCB-HOLDER-10 which can hold PCBs which are bigger than 150mm wide:

PCB-HOLDER-10 also can hold up to 39 panels/PCBs and you can slip your fingers under it:

PCB-HOLDER-Z has Z shape and has additional side holder which prevent PCBs to move during the transportation:

PCB-HOLDER-Z is very easy to manipulate.

All PCB Holders are made by Zinc galvanized steel against rusting.

TERES-I Laptop 3D plastic models are on GitHub

Yesterday we got great news.

One of our customer has been working to 3D capture the TERES-I plastics for a while and he uploaded on GitHub and released the files GPLv3+ and the CC by SA 4.0 License.

Now you can print your own plastics and modify them for your own needs.