LisaList2

Quote from: AlexTheCat123 on January 15, 2026, 06:55:07 PMAnd I know it looks really bad, but I decided to just autoroute this board since I don't care about this one that much compared to the main PCB.

tbh I kind-of like it when you find the odd little autorouted (or wire-wrapped or perf-boarded) interposer amidst otherwise thoughtfully-designed hardware --- it says to me "there's a story behind this"...

With the disclaimer that free suggestions are worth what you pay for them... here are two user-interface thoughts for V3, both probably pretty obvious and neither one a showstopper:

(1) It would be nice if it didn't matter which USB port received the mouse and which received the keyboard.
 
(2) The bottom edge of the board as depicted feels like the user-facing side of the machine, so it makes sense for that side to have the stuff the user is most often going to mess with. To me, this would argue for putting the floppy and hard drive SD slots on or near that edge if you can. If you need to free up room along the edge, maybe one of those double-stack USB sockets might help?

Aside from just checking everything over, I think the v2 board might be done now!

I ended up adding trimpots to all the LEDs instead of fixed series resistors so that I can perfectly dial in the brightness for each one. Right now, some are way too bright and others are on the dimmer side, so this should be a good way to even them out. And then I can measure the pot resistances to swap them out for fixed resistors in the final design.

I also thought that something was wrong with the TL074 audio amp/contrast circuit because it was producing super quiet audio through the built-in speaker, and no contrast signal at all. Not that it mattered a ton in my testing because I'm also doing audio and contrast over HDMI, but many people who will have their board connected to a monitor as opposed to a TV won't be able to get HDMI sound to begin with, so it's still really important for the speaker amp and onboard speaker to work. It turns out that nothing was wrong with it though; I had just forgotten to supply 12V to it and was only sending -12V! The v2 board now has an onboard step-up converter to generate 12V from the 5V USB power instead of requiring 12V to be provided externally from the barrel jack (which has now been removed entirely); not sure why I didn't do it like this before.

Oh yeah, I also added a "scanlines" jumper that will hopefully allow you to enable or disable simulated scanlines in the HDMI output. I accidentally enabled this feature on my RGBtoHDMI and thought it made the Lisa display look pretty cool, so might as well try to add it here. It looks like all it's doing is blacking out every third row (regular Lisa) or every second row (screen-modded Lisa) of pixels in the HDMI framebuffer, so that should be pretty easy to implement!

The v2 board will definitely still be in the prototype phase (although a lot more polished than v1), but hopefully v3 will be the final release board. We'll see!

Of course, if anybody sees any issues or areas for improvement in these pictures of the v2 board, let me know and I'll get it changed!

I'm getting closer to finishing with the v2 board! I finally got through all the level shifters; upgrading those took forever because it required rerouting pretty significant chunks of the board.

I've also added Twiggy support now, using the breakout idea we discussed earlier. I've attached a pic of what the breakout looks like. I really wish I could've used a shrouded header for the 4-pin connector that carries the extra Twiggy signals, but they just don't have any in stock. And I know it looks really bad, but I decided to just autoroute this board since I don't care about this one that much compared to the main PCB. Maybe I'll go back and manually route it later...

Wow, good to know! I had no clue anybody else was developing an emulator.

Don't want to hijack Alex's thread, just want to add more info:

I added support for Twiggy disk images in LisaEm last year, it wasn't available before that. It works sufficiently well and supports both Twiggy drives, e.g. I am able to install LOS 1.0 from Twiggy floppies which involves using both drives. More info on how to use it: https://github.com/arcanebyte/lisaem/pull/22

Also, there is already an open source alternative to FloppyEmu: https://github.com/vibr77/AppleIIDiskIIStm32F411 ,  for Apple II only. It is on their roadmap to support Macintosh and Lisa eventually, once Apple II works sufficiently well (it does). You can follow it at https://www.applefritter.com/content/apple-ii-disk-emulator-using-stm32 .

Quote from: Jacexpo on January 14, 2026, 10:16:44 PMIs there such a thing as a virtual twiggy?

As far as I know, there aren't any Twiggy emulators out there right now. LisaEm is capable of using Twiggy images, but it's pretty hit-or-miss, at least in my experience.

And to be clear, my first priority is Sony emulation, with Twiggy coming later. And that's only if I can even get Sony emulation working to begin with! I just want to set expectations low here so that nobody's disappointed if I fail miserably. Making a floppy emulator isn't quite as easy as a ProFile emulator!

Hi Tim,
Thanks for posting this, I have downloaded your image file and I am going to try it here.  What are the login credentials for you installation (login name and password)?
I will report back how this works out.
Rick

Is there such a thing as a virtual twiggy?

Here is my TEMPORARY link to my DropBox copy of my mini lisa SD card


DropBox SD card Image

Quote from: Lisa2 on January 09, 2026, 12:46:40 PMI ordered one of the 2.8" VGA displays and I will swap it into Ray's mini Lisa.  I hope to get it working with Ray's original build of LisaEM and SD card. 

I might like to get a copy of that original image when you get it working with the 2.8.

I have an image of my SD card but it is too big to post here. I will have to find some place to host it.