My name is Mike and I live in Western Canada, where the CreatiVision does not meaningfully exist. I've done a few clones of TMS99xx-based hardware in the past: the ColecoVision (as a surface-mount clone called the Leako) and the Sega SG-1000 (as a through-hole clone called the Soggy-1000.) The CreatiVision is really interesting as a next step, because I can marry my working TMS99xx clone setup with a new CPU and new peripherals like a keyboard and tape. You can see my posts about the console clones here.
I've started on a CreatiVision clone (although I still need a good pun for the name) at the request of Cheshire Noir, who pointed me towards this forum. It'll be NTSC for starters, and based off of the mk1 schematic. Things have gone fairly well so far but it will probably be a few more weeks of checking (especially around how the phi, phi/2, etc signals work) before I'll feel confident enough to order a board.
Eventual long-term goals once I get it to work:
- Tape emulation using a TzxDuino Reloaded or similar piece of hardware
- mk2 compatibility and a knockoff Z80/ColecoVision adapter. Although I have kind of a rough idea how this should work already, I want to keep the project smaller for the first few revisions of the board before I add decode overrides.
- Page switching to increase the amount of work RAM, as I did in my SG-1000 clone (1k -> 32k)
- Clone keyboard and controllers; my first version will probably be tested with a nightmare matrix laid out on some protoboard, or a microcontroller-based adapter for a PS/2 keyboard.
- Figure out how to integrate a TMS9929 for PAL, or an FPGA F18A recreation for RGB VGA