Quantel DPB-7001 Paintbox MAME Emulator

[dexters_lab]

i have never managed to get compass to run and tbh is beyond my sphere of interest, that being the 1980s/90s hardware

It is probably expecting a RS422 interface card which would have communicated with one of the peripheral interface boxes that would connect the tablet, keyboard, faders, trackballs etc

[iblowmymind]

Could be, but as the Compass was targeted at "hobbyists that wanted to learn the Quantel interface for free", requiring proprietary serial hardware would seem like an odd choice for me, as for an evaluation product they'd probably want to target it to everyone, including people that don't own expensive proprietary hardware.

[dexters_lab]

October 2022 update.

Things have really moved on. TheMogMiner has been making impressive progress on the Quantel DPB-7001 emulator.
Please note that current progress is NOT in the current build of MAME.

This video is from about 2 weeks ago and shows progress with painting functionality:

[dexters_lab]

from the 8th october:

Work on the Fujitsu M2294 SMD hard disk emulator that is required to be part of the overall emulation. Includes installation of the default brushes  and system startup from hard disk.

[dexters_lab]

9th october

We had been given a set of ROMs for the DPB that quantel used for diagnostics. These would have been installed on a card that would replace Computer 2 in the chassis. This would exchange the normal DPB software for the Diagnostics.

The Diagnostics are a set of low-level tests to the hardware. We were able to install and run the diagnostics. It has helped in finding issues with the emulator that need to be actioned.

Upper-left: Serial terminal
Upper-center: Combiner Card output
Upper-right: VDU console (not used by diagnostic card)
Lower-left: Store 1, raw
Lower-center: Store 2, raw
Lower-right: Ext 1 (R), Ext 2 (G), raw

[dexters_lab]

9th october

following the diagnostics this lead to several improvements to the emulator:

[dexters_lab]

16th october

work on typography, as you can see this still needs work. but it actually shows many elements of the DPB are working as this operation requires many hardware elements to be operational including brush stamping, framestores, sizing and filtering, hard disk emulation and disk controllers etc

[tropcls]

How is progress going?

[dexters_lab]

How is progress going?

nothing new just yet, the Filter and Size cards are proving to be a bit complex, they are the only two cards in the machine which don't have much information about them, so there's a bit more guess-work involved in figuring out how they work and how they tie into the other cards.