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FreeBee Premium, a free open source Microbee Premium clone

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Suzyj:
If you're Australian, and a codger like me, you'll probably remember the Microbee, a little Z-80 machine with a really good basic, reasonable graphics, and (in later models) CP/M.

They're ridiculously rare and expensive these days, not to mention clapped out and unreliable.

To fix both problems I've developed a new one. It's 100% through-hole, with no special PLDs or other mechanisms to lock it down. It runs all Microbee software just like a later one, in full and glorious 16 colours. There's a design for a multi-rom board (SuperPAK) if you prefer a ROM based machine, plus a board with Compact Flash that runs CP/M, treating the CF card as a hard disk.

It's really easy to build, made with parts that aren't super hard to get, and heaps of fun.

Go check it out at the Microbee Software Preservation Project:

https://www.microbee-mspp.org.au/forum/viewtopic.php?f=96&t=3130

Suzyj:
The construction notes do a pretty good job of describing what it's all about:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Y0UfahO4kn7-HrOwvS-JiWSZYfDxNQId/view

Halcyon:
Thanks for sharing!

I remember my cousins had a Microbee (can't remember what model) but it ended up getting tossed in the bin. I look back at all the old computers I had that just got thrown out and it makes me sad. Old Sharp Z80 machines, an IBM PC, etc...

Suzyj:
Yes it's amazing the things that we chuck out. In the very early nineties I extended my microbee at the time (a 32K one with tape storage) as a tech project with 512K RAM, a floppy disk controller, and real time clock by building and hand etching a new coreboard. I remember hand-drilling every single via, and threading wire through the holes that was soldered both sides. Then I grabbed a disk drive unit from a Dulmont Magnum, of all things, and had a CP/M machine.

A couple of years later that all went in the bin during a house move. If I knew then how nostalgic I'd be in thirty years I'd have kept it.

Not that it really matters so much. Real microbees are getting almost impossible now to use, as the keyboards have little conductive rubber bits that just don't work any more.

CatalinaWOW:
I face the alternative to chucking that "too good to trash" stuff out.  Literally hundreds of kilograms of stuff that I will never have time to play with, and the few times that I have gone back a revived one, it isn't as much fun as I remembered. 

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