Sony Kanji Video Titler XV-J555

In this series about MSX and video production we saw many Video Titlers; one from Panasonic, two from JVC and many from Sony. Of those, only the ones from Sony uses all standard MSX chips and a MSX compatible BIOS. I still have three other video edit gear from Sony to show.

Today is the day of Sony Kanji Video Titler XV-J555

The Sony Kanji Video Titler XV-J555

The first thing that we can saw is: Sony tried something different this time, at least in design. This isn't the first time that we saw a MSX with an integrated Trackball; nor the first Sony video equipment with a trackball. But, definetly, this is the first Video Titler with an integrated Trackball that we saw in this blog.

Connections of Sony Picture Computer XV-T600,
look the trackball connected to the "joystick" port

National FS-5500, a MSX2 with integrated trackball

By now it's the Sony Video Titler with less external connectors. It have only one A/V input and one output, both with RCA and S-Video connectors. The compact design eliminates the need of the keyboard connector as all the controls are in top of this unit. And, obviously, the integrated Trackball removes the DB9 joystick connector.

All the controls that the other Sony Video Titlers have
in their mini keyboards are integrated in XV-J555

Only one set of input and output connectors. The switch at
right selects the video between the RCA and S-Video

This lack of connectors isn't bad as it sounds: the Sony XV-J555 is Video Titler, not a computer. With all controls and interfaces packed in a single unit, it saves in maintenance as it have less connectors to break; for home users, less connectors equals simpler to learn; to the "home-pro" user being in a single unit will save space in his desk (that already have at least two VCRs, a camcorder, maybe a digitizer and color corrector...).

Anyone who buys vintage computers with separated keyboards can say another advantage of the all-in-one design: less items to be lost in the attics, storage units and basements.

What is inside Sony XV-J555?

At left side the mainboard. At the right side, the top
have the power supply and the bottom the trackball

Although with an inovative external design, the inside of Sony XV-J555 is very boring. Maybe some electronic engineer or technician could highlights something impressive in XV-J555's mainboard, but to my untrained eyes the only interesting stuff here is how this board looks compact compared with the others.

To our "MSX based" checklist, Sony XV-J555 checks all items: it have a Z80 compatible from Sharp (LH0080A), the MSX2 video processor (Yamaha V9938), a huge amount of ROM ICs (5 in total) and, at solder side, an Yamaha S1985 (MSX-System II) with all MSX2 logic. I still didn't dumped the ROMs, but even without the dumps I am pretty sure that this machine is an MSX based appliance.

From top to bottom: two 8KB SRAMs from Toshiba (TC5564APL)
powered by the CR2032 battery at its right side; then we
have three Fujitsu MB834000A ROMs, which one with 512KB;
the last one is a SONY MaskROM LH53103A.

Here we can see the a 128KB MaskROM (SONY LH531067),
the CPU (Sharp LH0080A) and a 30-pin connector

The XV-J555 have the same ROM ICs than XV-J550 and I won't be surprised if it have the exact the same or a slightly updated contents. Comparing with XV-J550, the XV-J555 doesn't have the big OKI IC and the, nice for hacking, MSX slot connector. I still don't have idea what the OKI M71H003 does, but I guess the 30-pin connector in the XV-J555 is the MSX connector substitute: you can connect a 128KB ROM with the diagnostics software there or some other auxiliar board.

The V9938, the four VRAMs (128KB) and the two RAMs (64KB)

The trackball! Sadly one of the plastic holders was broked
so it doesn't rolls well, but it isn't hard to fix it. The
connection between the two boards is by nine tiny wires.
Yes, it's a MSX joystick port, only the DB9 isn't here. From
the trackball board there is a connection with the top side
of XV-J555, where resides the two trackball buttons.

The solder side of XV-J555 have the Yamaha S1985 (we already knew that), the Sony MB64H444 custom mapper and another two big Sony ICs. My guess is that one (or both) those Sony ICs are the OKI M73H003 substitute, but it's only a guess.

Sony XV-J555 solder side

Can't read the top IC, but I guess it's a SONY L7A0264.
The one at center-middle is the SONY MB64H444

Yamaha S1985 (MSX-System II) and, hey, another board from Mitsumi

The SONY CXD1358, this same IC is in XV-T550, XV-J770 and XV-J777

This board signalizes again that Sony XV-J550 is the "father" of all Sony Video Titlers that we saw in this blog. The custom Sony custom ICs that we saw in XV-J555 are shared by XV-T550, XV-J770 and XV-J777, only XV-J550 has a different configuration.

After all, plus one to our list of MSX based Video Titlers. Next step, another two Video Titlers to check!

Sony Kanji Video Titler XV-J777: Inside the ROMs

In our last post we saw two video titlers from Sony:  XV-J770 and XV-J777. We find that they are both MSX based machines (if you are keeping a count, now Sony have four video titlers listed in this blog). In that previous post we show a little snippet from one of the ROMs only to confirm that those devices are MSXs. Now it's time to see all the secrets from those ROMs

The five chips at left and the one just below the Zilog are all ROMs

There are six Mask-ROM chips inside each of those video titlers, all from Fujitsu: 3 x 831000 and 3 x MB834000, totalizing 1920KB, which is a lot of data for an 8 bits computer. Besides some version numbers, I don't believe the contents of those ROMs are too different between the two titlers, Alexandre Tabajara have a XV-J777 and made a dump of all those ROMs, so we will examine them.

The first thing that I did to examine those ROMs was to split each dump file in 16KB, 32KB, 64KB, 128KB and 256KB blocks. The second step was to compare the sha1sum of each block with other better known MSX's ROMs. That strategy gives to us all the contents of one of the 831000s:

0fbd45ef3dd7bb82d4c31f1947884f411f1ca344  hb-f1xd_msx2sub.rom
12f2cc79b3d09723840bae774be48c0d721ec1c6  hb-f1xd_disk.rom
4ce41fcc1a603411ec4e99556409c442078f0ecf  hb-f1xd_basic-bios2.rom

They are the HB-F1XD's ROMs. But those files together have only 64KB and the chip is a 128KB Mask-ROM, what Sony did with the extra space? Well, Sony put a copy of the first half of the chip on the second half. The ROM have this layout:

00000-07FFF BASIC-BIOS2
08000-0BFFF MSX2-SUBROM
0C000-0FFFF DISK-ROM

10000-17FFF BASIC-BIOS2
18000-1BFFF MSX2-SUBROM
1C000-1FFFF DISK-ROM

The sha1sum strategy give to us another easy find:

6acaf2eeb57f65f7408235d5e07b7563229de799  hb-f900_kanjifont.rom

This ROM is mapped at the last 128KB of one of those MB834000, which leaves 384KB missing. And more unknown 1024KB in the other two MB834000. I believe that the majority of those ROMs are Kanji-ROMs, so we begin another sha1sum comparison, this time, splitting the Kanji Font of HB-F1XDJ in smaller blocks. That gave a better view. First, the Kanji Font of HB-F900 is included and mapped in the first half of the HB-F1XDJ's Kanji ROM. Second, all data from HB-F1XDJ's Kanji ROM are inside XV-J777 ROMs, but split in two ICs:

1st KANJI-ROM
        00000-1FFFF
        20000-3FFFF
        40000-5FFFF
        60000-7FFFF JIS1 (HB-F900/F1XDJ/F1XV)
 
2nd KANJI-ROM
        00000-1FFFF
        20000-3FFFF
        40000-5FFFF
        60000-7FFFF JIS2 (HB-F1XDJ/XV)

My guess is that one of those chips have the JIS1 and the other one the JIS2 fonts, in different resolutions.

We still have another 512KB MaskROM to examine. While it doesn't have the same sha1sums, the contents of this last ROM looks a lot like the second half of the firmware ROM from HB-F1XDJ, as you can see from this sample:

XV-J777 MSX-JE ROM
00000000  |±       ±²Ù×ÝÄÞ |
00000010  |±·º     ±¹Þ±ÌÞ× |
00000020  |±¼Þ±    ±Ã      |
00000030  |±Í޶ܠ  ±×²ÊÞ   |
00000040  |±ÜÃÌÀÒ  ²¯·Æ    |
00000050  |²²¸ÙÒ   ²·µ²    |
00000060  |²º³     ²½ÞÐÀÞ  |
00000070  |²Á¼ÞÏ   ²Äº     |
00000080  |²ÎÞ¸    ²ÚÁÞ´   |
00000090  |²ÝÁ·    ³¶ÍÞ    |

HB-F1XDJ MSX-JE ROM
00080000  |±       ±²Ù×ÝÄÞ |
00080010  |±·º     ±¹Þ±ÌÞ× |
00080020  |±¼Þ±    ±Ã      |
00080030  |±Í޶ܠ  ±×²ÊÞ   |
00080040  |±ÜÃÌÀÒ  ²¯·Æ    |
00080050  |²²¸ÙÒ   ²·µ²    |
00080060  |²º³     ²½ÞÐÀÞ  |
00080070  |²Á¼ÞÏ   ²Äº     |
00080080  |²ÎÞ¸    ²ÚÁÞ´   |
00080090  |²ÝÁ·    ³¶ÍÞ    |

With this last one, we can say that all MB834000 chips are related to handle the input and display of Japanese language.

Now we only have two ROM ICs to check, each one with 128KB. After search for "SONY" inside one of the ROM dumps this is what we found:

00012000  |SONY JFEP2  Ver |
00012030  |SONY Corporarion|

I remember that JFEP string... maybe from one of those latest examined ROMs? Yes! In HB-F1XDJ's MSX-JE ROM!

00000010  |SONY  JFEP  TINY|
00002000  |SONY JFEP2  Ver |

JFEP is a acronym that for "Japanese Front End Processor", and with that we have all the HB-F1XDJ MSX-JE inplemented in XV-J777. It's only a newer version:

HB-F1XDJ MSX-JE ROM
00000010  |SONY  JFEP  TINY|
00000020  | DUMMY  Version |
00000030  |1.0  May  7 1987|
00000040  |  Copyright (C) |
--
00002000  |SONY JFEP2  Ver |
00002010  |1.00  May 31 198|
00002020  |8  Copyright(C) |
00002030  |SONY Corporarion|

XV-J777 MSX-JE ROM
00012000  |SONY JFEP2  Ver |
00012010  |1.06  Mar 14 198|
00012020  |9  Copyright(C) |
00012030  |SONY Corporarion|

That explains why, although very similiar, the sha1sums of those ROMs doesn't match: XV-J777 have a newer version of F1XDJ (and F1XV) firmware. This firmware is mapped to the higher 64KB of a 831000 ROM. We still need take a look at lower 64KB.

The first 32KB looks like some kind of filesystem:

00000000  ffffffffffffffff ffffffffffffffff
          |ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿ|
00000010  ffffffffffffffff ffffffffffffffff
          |ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿ|
00000020  4549535531303136 2020464e54000000
          |EISU1016  FNT...|
00000030  00200000580d0000 0000000000000000
          |. ..X...........|
00000040  4549535531303234 2020464e54000000
          |EISU1024  FNT...|
00000050  00400000a01a0000 0000000000000000
          |.@.. ...........|
00000060  4549535532303136 2020464e54000000
          |EISU2016  FNT...|
00000070  00300000580d0000 0000000000000000
          |.0..X...........|
00000080  4549535532303234 2020464e54000000
          |EISU2024  FNT...|
00000090  00600000a01a0000 0000000000000000
          |.`.. ...........|

By the name of those files, say that they are fonts with 16 and 24 points is a good bet, but why have more fonts? We already have 1024KB of fonts in the Kanji-ROM ICs. Things get a bit clearer after we know that "Eisu" (英数) means "Alphanumeric", so those are the fonts for latin alphabet, and those in the Kanji-ROM are... Kanji.

In this ROM we still have a last 32KB block to see. And it's very interesting. It begins with:

00008000  c3c0400056455231 2e300000000000ff
          |ÃÀ@.VER1.0.....ÿ|

Which is very uncommon for a block header. I searched for text strings within this dump and found the following messages:

rom test
Font rom pass
Dic rom  pass
Basic    pass 1/1 sum %04x
Kanji 1  pass
%s %d/4 sum %04x
Kanji 2  pass
%s %d/4 sum %04x
%s %d/4 sum %04x
Program  pass 1/2 sum %04x
Program  pass 2/2 sum %04x

It's a health check software!! And, by this list of ROMs to be tested, now we know that the chip that have the second half of X1XDJ's firmware is the Dictionary part of MSX-JE.

This self test software helps to solve another two questions. Take a look on these strings:

XV-T550 test program ver 1.0
XV-J777 test program ver 1.1

With that, we now know why XV-T550 have a internal slot: to connect a cartridge with the self test program and help the technician to repair it.  The other question that these strings solves is: why XV-J550 and XV-T550 are so different? In our post about those two titlers I wrote:

My guess: the XV-J550 was first released in Japan. Seeing that it's a good product and there is a broader home video market, Sony wanted to sell it in Europe, but had to make some revisions on the board for this release; this new board was meant to be shared by the two versions of the titler (XV-J550 and XV-T550), but for some reason the XV-J550 with the new PCB did not reached the market (or we didn't yet found any XV-J550 with this new board). I believe that, instead release the same old product with a new internal organisation, Sony did launched new video titlers, like the XV-J770.

The test program shared by XV-T550 and XV-J777 seems to confirm my guess, while the western markets got the XV-T550 the Japanese market got XV-J770 and XV-J777.

And, with that last 32KB, the memory map of this ROM is:

00000-07FFF EISU 16/24 Fonts
08000-0FFFF Test Program
10000-1FFFF JFEP2 VER1.06 Mar 14 1989

There is now only one ROM that we don't examined yet and we already know what is there. We found the MSX BIOS, Kanji-ROM, MSX-JE and even a Test Program, but what is missing in this Video Titler? The Video Titler Software! And yes, as expected, the last 831000 is the Video Titler Software.

It's a 128KB ROM, divided in 16 blocks of 8KB, some of them are clearly labelled:

00006000  |BANK3 ÃË Ã[ Ãw¨Ã|
00008000  |BANK4 ÃF¢..å..å.|
0000a000  |BANK5 Ãf§ÃȦÃѦÃ|
0000c000  |BANK6 Ã7«Ã3«ÃM«Ã|
0000e000  |BANK7 Ã΢ÃN£Ãò¢Ã|
00010000  |BANK10Ã. 2.Ø:.Ø·|
00012000  |BANK11ÃÓ¡¬.s.K..|
00014000  |BANK12ÃA°Ãå®Ã.¿"|
00016000  |BANK13Ã7 ...*­Aë|
00018000  |BANK14Ã. 2.Ø:.Ø·|
0001a000  |BANK15Ã. +}¤<ÈÃ.|
0001c000  |BANK16ÃW¤ÃM Ãå°"|

Banks 1, 2, 8 and 9 aren't labelled. But they are there:

00000000  |AB.B............|
00002000  |Ýåá....ÍÉe¯íyíy>|
00004000  |·(+Í.}åÍy})å*ÏÃ.|
0001e000  |ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿ|

The first bank have the program header and the video titler software starts here. The second and third bank seems to have some program parts and the last block looks like a empty filler, the 0001db7c address is the last byte which isn't FF recorded in this ROM.

The last interesting data from those ROMs are some dates:

00000000  |AB.B............|
00000010  |VER2.07 89/3/24 |
--
0000e070  |...[.(C)1987 by |
0000e080  |Sony Corporation|

This is the version 2.07 of the Sony Video Titler software, built in 1989. There is a copyright notice from 1987, maybe from the first release?

We still have more Video Titlers from Sony to examine. But, by now, Sony's the recycling queen! Panasonic did put their old font ROMs in the VW-KT300, but Sony reuses everything: all the Video Titlers uses a very similar build, the same HB-F1XD ROMs, same Kanji-ROMs and, except the Titler Software itself, all the other stuff are small updates from other ROMs released in other MSXs.

Even the Titler Software, while not coming from their MSX computers, looks to be reused between it's Titlers (to check this we need to dump more ROMs to compare).

They really know how to reuse their know-how and previous designs.

If you want examine the ROMs, I put the dump files inside this tarball with a text describing their contents and what I know about them now. Good Luck!

Sony Kanji Video Titler XV-J770 and XV-J777

The last Sony equipment that we saw was the XV-T600, which is not a MSX. That's not fair, Sony was a big supporter of MSX standard and, most important to this blog, sold many devices powered by MSX technology. To repair this injustice we will examine two Sony Kanji Video Titlers at once: XV-J770 and XV-J777.

The XV-J770 is in Wikipedia's list and we can see it in the MSX Magazine's pages:

Picture of Sony XV-J770 from page 79 of MSX Magazine 1990-04

If you have a good eye (and good memory), the mouse of XV-J770 is the well known Sony MOS-1, the same one that Sony sold for their MSX computers and is included in XV-J550. The small controller keyboard is the same of XV-J550 too. Although not famous as its cousin XV-J770, XV-J777 have a very close look.

Pile of Sony Kanji Video Titlers.
From top to bottom: XV-J550, XV-J770 and XV-J777.
The silks are the only difference that can be
spotted between XV-J770 and XV-J777.

The keyboard and mouse connectors
are the same on all three models.

They have the same high and are both taller than the XV-J550, which gives more space inside their cabinets. More space is a good thing if you think in to hack those machines. They are high enough to put a small cartridge, and the XV-J550 have a internal MSX slot. The expansibility of the XV-J770 and XV-J777 looks promising.

From behind, all connectors are the same, Sony included
S-Video output on those machines. The XV-J777's rear metal
plate is painted in black while in XV-J770 it's in bare metal.

Both units have a power outlet to connect other equipments
(in this picture the power outlet of XV-J777
is obstructed by XV-J770's power cord)

Another difference between these two titler's models and the previous one, the XV-J550, is the presence of a external mass storage. They have a slot for IC Cards, this way the user isn't stuck with the internal storage, which is a small (16KB) SRAM backed by battery. With all this storage available, the front of both titlers have a button row to select between the many data banks saved.

The two video titlers have a button row to select which
of programmed title sequence will be used. The door
below those buttons protects the IC card slot.

Behind the doors, the IC card slot.

What's inside XV-J770 and XV-J777?

The internals of those two video titlers aren't the same, while they are still very similar. In a Sony's catalog from 1991 those two equipments are announced and the only listed difference between XV-J777 and XV-J770 is that XV-J777 comes with an IC card. So I guess that the internals of those two machines are intended to be the same but I have two different revisions of the main board. Probably if someone buys many of those titlers we will find some XV-J777 and XV-J770 with the same board.

Lucky us, so we can see two different boards (though very similar):

Main board of Sony Kanji Video Titler XV-J770

Main board of Sony Kanji Video Titler XV-J777.
You can see, at lower of this picture, the "included"
64KB IC card inserted in its slot.

The first thing that I noticed after open the titlers was: there is no slot connector. Damn. The XV-J550 have a MSX slot connector, but doesn't have internal clearance to put anything in this slot. The XV-J770 and XV-J777 have room to put a cartridge but doesn't have the connector.

The component side of the board have the main processor (Zilog Z80 in my XV-J777 and Sharp LH0080A in my XV-J770), the VDP (Yamaha V9938) and the respective ROMs and RAMs. As the boards are almost the same, I'll use the XV-J777 pictures:

The first column of IC's are all ROMs; the second column
have, from top to bottom, two SRAMs (8KB each), the CPU (Zilog Z80) and,
lastly, another ROM. At bottom right two groups of RAMs.

At top, a bit blurred, you can see six RAM ICs,
64KB as Main RAM and 128KB as Video RAM (in the
previous picture you can see better these chips).
At bottom, the MSX2's Video Processor, the Yamaha V9938.

We already have many items to identify these two machines as MSX based: Z80 CPU, V9938 VDP, VRAMs, RAMs, etc. We still need to check the ROMs and to find the PSG and PPI equivalents.

At solder side the two boards are almost the same, too:

The solder side of XV-J777 main board

And the one from XV-J770

The solder side gives to us more items in our MSX based checklist, there we can see the PSG and PPI equivalent, the MSX-System II (Yamaha S1985) and a Sony custom memory mapper (Sony MB64H444).

The two QFPs at middle are the Yamaha S1985 and the Sony MB64H444

To eliminate the last item on our checklist, Tabajara saved the contents of all those ROMs from XV-J777 and now we can confirm:

00007ed0  01 09 00 09 22 62 f8 c9  4d 53 58 20 20 73 79 73  |...."bøÉMSX  sys|
00007ee0  74 65 6d 00 76 65 72 73  69 6f 6e 20 32 2e 30 0d  |tem.version 2.0.|
00007ef0  0a 00 4d 53 58 20 42 41  53 49 43 20 00 43 6f 70  |..MSX BASIC .Cop|
00007f00  79 72 69 67 68 74 20 31  39 38 35 20 62 79 20 4d  |yright 1985 by M|
00007f10  69 63 72 6f 73 6f 66 74  0d 0a 00 20 42 79 74 65  |icrosoft... Byte|

They are MSX based machines!! These ROMs will be the subject of another post (hey, there are a lot of ROM ICs to be analyzed)

Another nice detail in solder side is the board manufacturer name: Mitsumi Elec. Co. Ltd. Mitsumi was the only manufacturer in the list of MSX licensees that didn't built any MSX (NEC did some MSXs for Philips). Even doing these PCBs at Sony's request, I guess we can now say that Mitsumi built at least these MSXs.

NTT CAPTAIN Multi-Station - part 2

The design of the two known MSX from Takaoka are very similar. Almost the same color palette (tedious beige) and structure. Until the NTT machine's arrival, I guessed the two metal boxes are the same, which is not true, one is a bit wider and lower than the other, and the NTT CAPTAIN Multi-Station have more internal structures holding the cabinet together.

Top: NTT CAPTAIN Multi-Station, Bottom: AUCNET NIA-2001

Front: First row: three buttons (Power, CAPTAIN, Telephone),
four leds (Power, CAPTAIN, Telephone, IC CARD), remote sensor,
two MSX cartridge slots (50 pins). Second row: keyboard
connector (DB25), two joystick conectors (DB9 male) and
the IC card slot.

Back: Power switch, two power outlets, ground, two phone jacks (RJ11),
a small metal plate, printer connector (Centronics 14-pin female), the phone
line selector (pulse, tone, etc), RGB connector, A/V connectors (RCA),
RF channel selector switch, and cable connectors.

Behind that small metal plate there is a lot of DIP switches.

And what's inside NTT CAPTAIN Multi-Station?

Like the external design, the insides of the two MSXs from Takaoka are very similar.

AUCNET NIA-2001 internals: one big mother-board, MSX slots
connected by flat cables, a video daughter-board and modem daughter-board.

NTT CAPTAIN Multi-Station internals: one big mother-board, MSX slots
connected by flat cables, a video daughter-board and modem daughter board.

The mainboard is the MSX computer, only the RF modulator and video outputs are in the video daughter board. The modem card is... a modem. So far I do not know how it is seen by MSX. The machine turn on and goes to CAPTAIN menu, even when the modem is not connected to the mainboard.

NTT CAPTAIN Multi-Station uses a Sharp LH0080A (Z80 compatible) as main CPU, the PPI/PSG/etc are integrated in the MSX-SystemII (S1985 from Yamaha) and there are some Mask ROMs and a EPROM in the board. The three M5M231000 from Misubishi totals to 384KB of Kanji ROM. The BIOS and other code are in the socketed EPROM.

The small square chip at bottom is the S1985. The cable at
its side goes to front panel (where we can find the remote
sensor, three buttons and four leds). The CPU LH0080A is at
center, with the Mask ROMs at the left and the modem connector
at right. The small button at center-left is a reset switch.

Without booting in the MSX mode (and the remote controller is needed to do that) it isn't easy to know how much RAM is present and detected by the MSX. There are six RAM ICs from Mitsubishi and four empty sockets. The silk of those six RAM ICs are very washed, but I read 4464 on some of them. This is compatible with other sources that says the NTT CAPTAIN Multi-Station have 192KB RAM.

About the empty sockets, two have a 4464 silk and the other two a 4416 silk. 256KB is a amount of RAM that makes sense. I believe the machine is ready for 256KB RAM, but sometime in development someone (NTT? Takaoka?) made the CAPTAIN software works fine with less RAM. And RAM costs money, so the machine goes to market with the not traditional 192KB RAM.

At top right there is a buzzer that can be switched on/off
by a external swith. At center you can see the four empty
sockets. The six RAM chips are at right. The bottom of this
board have the slot and power connectors.

The 4416 sockets are a bit more tricky to guess what would be their finality. But the 1986's article gives some light. The article's authors say the minimum requirement to use the designed CAPTAIN adapter is a MSX with 16KB RAM. And this is one of the many clues that NTT CAPTAIN Multi-Station is a derived work of the equipment described in NTT's paper.

The modem have a speed unusual in MSX but common in CAPTAIN adapters: 4800/75bps. That speed and the Z80 SIO are more links between this machine and NTT previous research.

NTT CAPTAIN Multistation's modem board. There is a switch
to select the phone line type (pulse, tone, etc), a set of
dip switches that I don't know what they do and two phone
jacks, all those are accessible without the need to open
the machine. Talking about the ICs, there is a Z80 SIO
from Sharp (LH0084) and another big chip without any marks.

Close to video board we can see the Yamaha YM2413, the sound processor used in MSX-MUSIC and in many CAPTAIN terminals:

Yamaha YM2413 at left and the BIOS/Software 128KB EPROM at right.
Don't know yet what the 8KB EEPROM at center contains.

Why the adapter in "Videotex Terminal Based on personal computer" did not use the YM2413? Because it did not exist at that time. Yamaha created the YM2413 because the alternatives are too expensive. It's a simplified version of YM3812 (OPL2), which is compatible with the YM3526 (OPL). The YM2413 was released in July 1986, to be used in"data for tone with ROM" video text (captain) and teletext adapters, as we see in the "Digest Dempa, Volume 4":

"In July, the Nippon Gakki Company (Yamaha) will start marketing the YM2413 sound source LSI used for videotex adapters and teletext receivers. Sample price is ¥3,000 ($17). The YM2413 uses a frequency modulation surround source method to reproduce stereo sound and it incorporates data for tone with ROM, rhythm sound with tone circuits and D/A converter. Nippon Gakki will produce 50,000 units per month."

MSX users knows a similar story with the same results: MSX-AUDIO (Y8950, a cousin of YM3526) was too expensive and the MSX-MUSIC (YM2413) gives a "good enough" sound. MSX-MUSIC wins the market.

The small video board have nothing special:

RF outputs, channel selector, A/V jacks and RGB. Nothing to see here.

But, behind the small board, there is something special.

First row: 21.47 XTAL and 256KB of VRAM
Second row: Yamaha V9938 and V99C37 (!!!)

Whaaaaat?? Yes, there is the traditional MSX2 VDP but a lot of VRAM (256KB!!!) and another IC at its side. This makes me remember again the article which states that the CAPTAIN adapter contains:

"(1)MSX-VIDEO(V9938): MSX-VIDEO is a video display controller LSI, which has upward compatibility with the former VDP(TMS-9918A). MSX-VIDEO has many display modes, some of which are especially suitable for videotex application. In the adapter, MSX-VIDEO controls video RAMs and CDC.
(2)CDC(CAPTAIN Display Controller): CDC provides display functions peculiar to CAPTAIN PLPS such as miniblock coloring, 16 out of 4.096-color LUT, flashing, and multi-frame structure."

The V99C37 even had a similar name, it's called VDC, Video Display Controller. While the CAP-M-ST have big similarities with the hardware described in the article, there are differences too, the CAPTAIN adapter have a lot less memory:

"(3)VRAM(Video RAM) 32K Bytes x 3: The CAPTAIN image data of each frame is stored."

And the descriptions that I found about V99C37 on internet says that it provides a palette of "256 out of 260000 colors" (probably that 260000 is 262144, which are the color possibilities with 6 bits per color channel (R,G,B)). A bit more than "16 out of 4096". Finally, V99C37 can't be (in it's final form) the same CDC used in 1986 because it isn't available at that time:

(C)1987 ASCII

In "Japanese Semiconductor Industry Service", from 1988, it's stated that the firsts V99C37 are available from July 1987:

"Yamaha—An MSX personal computer CRT controller (V9938); CAPTAIN videotex processing capability when combined with character transmission display function CRT controller (V99C37) by ASCII Inc.; 400mW power consumption; 100-pin, 4-sided flat package; 84-pin PLCC being studied; sampling since July at ¥10,000 ($66.67)"

But there are too many similarities to be ignored. My guess is that V99C37 is an evolution of an early CDC design. Present a paper about a physical product in a 1986's conference... probably the CDC and the adapter are from 1985.

We had to wait another year, until finally the "integrated PC type having a decoder function CAPTAIN senior" that would be "developed in the future." It is good to see the various fragments coming together and forming a story

And, in next post, we go back to our  "MSX and video production" series.

NTT CAPTAIN Multi-Station - part 1

A little interval in our series about MSX and video production. I got my hands in a NTT CAPTAIN Multi-Station. And, while it isn't a hidden MSX, it's not a very common one and have some nice and bizarre features that needs to be shown.

A complete NTT CAPTAIN Multi-Station system, with an
unconnected keyboard, an unconnected joypad, a good
view of its massive remote controller and an IC card
(picture from MSX Magazine 1988/01)

Some people in MSX's community calls this machine as only "CAPTAIN", it's good to notice that CAPTAIN is a videotex system (the acronym means Character And Pattern Telephone Access Information Network") and many different devices are built to connect to this network. We already visited other CAPTAIN adapter on this blog, but that device was not a MSX or MSX based.

The first time in this blog that we saw the NTT CAPTAIN Multi-Station was in one of the posts about AUCNET NIA-2001. The AUCNET NIA-2001 is a hidden MSX TurboR machine that have an AUCNET logo on its front, JBTV registration on back side and everything else built by Takaoka. And no MSX logo.

The NTT CAPTAIN Multi-Station is in a very similar situation: it have the NTT logo on its front, everything else built by Takaoka and, at least in the two units that I saw, there is no MSX logo (but the one in MSX Magazine's picture have a small MSX2 logo).

Where is the little MSX2 logo?

I don't know why some CAPTAIN Multi-Stations comes with and others without MSX logo, maybe waiting the license? But there is no effort to hide the MSX relationship. The boot screen shows an option to enter in MSX mode. You  need to type "* M S X #" in the remote control and, sadly, I don't have the remote control.

*MSX# : Personal Computer Start-Up

Mintwave, Takaoka's subsidiary and heir of computer terminal business, is silent about NIA-2001, but it keeps the NTT CAPTAIN Multi-Station on company's history page:

1987: NTT向けキャプテンマルチステーション 販売
Translated by Google: "Captain multi-station sales to NTT"

No mystery here, NTT commissioned Takaoka to build this CAPTAIN terminal and release it at 1987. The MSX Magazine article about NTT CAPTAIN Multi-Station is from January of 1988. And the silk in the back of my unit says the authorizations to use it as a communications device are from 1987:

This machine itself was built in October of 1987, I guess it's one of the first batches, since the CAPTAIN services in Kobe started at 1987-10-22:

Seal with the product's name: CAP-M-ST, the specification's number (?): 195,
power consumption: AC100V 30W, serial number: 17050419 and built date, 87-10.

With those dates the things become more interesting. In 1986, Kazuhisa Yanaka, Yukio Kobayashi and Takeshi Matsuoka, all from NTT, publish an article titled: "Videotex Terminal Based On Personal Computer". In this paper they talk about a new videotex terminal, using a MSX computer, an adapter with graphics functions and a ROM cartridge with the software.

The NTT researchers describes the adapter's hardware with a Z80 SIO for communications control, a modem with 4800/75bps, FM music (YM3526 + 16K ROM and 16K RAM ) and a combination of MSX-VIDEO (V9938) with 3 x 32K RAM and CDC (Captain Display Controller) to handle the display functions. This adapter could be connected into any MSX with at least 16K RAM.

The paper's conclusion was that "a high performance CAPTAIN terminal can be fabricated by adding an appropriate adapter and software to a common 8-bit personal computer (MSX PC), utilizing two LSIs: MSX-VIDEO and CDC", and (important to us) "An integrated type PC possessing a high rank CAPTAIN decoder functions remains to be developed in future".

Then, in 1987, NTT releases a new CAPTAIN terminal, one with computer functions integrated: the NTT CAPTAIN Multi-Station

Sony Kanji Video Titler XV-J550: the inside

A video titler is the equipment responsible to create title screens, credit lists, captions, subtitles, etc. You know, the kind of video editing that today is done by a software in any computer or even in cellphones. In the XV-J550's days this was done by specialized equipment: the video titler.

Last post we present the XV-J550 and XV-T550 video titlers. One is targeted to Japanese market and the other to western markets, this difference reflects in some changes between both models. Being a video titler, XV-J550's main function is to put text on screen, since it's aimed for Japanese market, it needs to support Kanji characters, so it have, at least, more ROM than XV-T550, to store these Kanji Fonts.

Although they have the same outward appearance, XV-J550 and XV-T550 have different PCBs. Evidence suggests that the XV-T550's PCB was prepared to be shared with the XV-J550, there are some unpopulated placements for ROM on XV-T550's mainboard that can be used by Kanji ROM.

This is the mainboard from XV-T550, take a look in the two unpopulated
placements for ROM chips and the shielding over V9938
(picture from this MSX Village thread)

By now, all (three) XV-J550 that I saw the insides had the same PCB's look (maybe different minor revisions, but the same overall shape). And this PCB's appearance is consistently different from the one that I saw in pictures of XV-T550 and is printed in its service manual:

This is the XV-J550 mainboard seen from solder side.
The two chips that you can see are the Sony custom mapper
and the MSX-System II

And this is the XV-T550 mainboard, picture from XV-T550 Service Manual.
You can see that many components are in different locations on the board.

My guess: the XV-J550 was first released in Japan. Seeing that it's a good product and there is a broader home video market, Sony wanted to sell it in Europe, but had to make some revisions on the board for this release; this new board was meant to be shared by the two versions of the titler (XV-J550 and XV-T550), but for some reason the XV-J550 with the new PCB did not reached the market (or we didn't yet found any XV-J550 with this new board). I believe that, instead release the same old product with a new internal organisation, Sony did launched new video titlers, like the XV-J770.

What's inside XV-J550?

There is two big boards (and some small boards) in XV-J550. One with all the MSX hardware and other responsible to handle the AV inputs and outputs. The designers made a very compact unit, the other video titlers from Sony have almost two times the height of the XV-J550/XV-T550:

XV-J550 on top of XV-J777.

This compactness made the XV-J550 a beautiful equipment, but compromises the "hacking" possibilities. It's impossible to use the cartridge slot  while XV-J550 is closed and is very hard to fit any additional circuitry in this limited space.

How you can use the XV-J550/XV-T550 cartridge slot

XV-J550 have most of what can be expected from a MSX2 system, but it have only one joystick port, one MSX slot and the keyboard connector doesn't have all pins connected to use a complete MSX keyboard.

CPU: Z80 @ 3.58Mhz
RAM: 64KB
VDP: Yamaha V9938 with 128KB VRAM
PPI: MSX-System II
Sound: PSG equivalent inside MSX-System II
Storage: 64KB SRAM energized by a CR2032 battery
Keyboard: separated keyboard customized for video production functions
Additional features: Superimposer
I/O ports: two stereo AV inputs and two stereo AV outputs, one keyboard connector, one joystick port and one MSX slot.

There is no external storage in XV-J550, but you can save your title sequences in the battery backed SRAM. The MSX slot lacks some pins too, namely: +12/-12 volts, SOUNDIN, SW1, SW2 and BUSDIR.

The XV-J550's mainboard. All ROMs are populated, there is
a big OKI chip connected and no shielding over the V9938.
It's in the same position of the XV-T550's mainboard that
we previously show, so you can easily compare both boards.

Without the RAM and ROM chips, the main ICs on processor board are:

Oki M71H003: Unknown
Sharp LH0080A: Z80 compatible
Sony MB64H444:Custom memory mapper
Yamaha S1985: MSX-SYSTEM II
Yamaha V9938: Video Display Processor

Here you can see the Z80, the mysterious OKI chip
and some RAMs and ROMs. You can't see the slot connector
because there is a MegaFlashROMSCC+SD 512 connected there.

The V9938 and the 128KB VRAM

MSX-System II from Yamaha

Sony custom mapper. Probably a Fujitsu MB64H444PF gate array

There is many ROM chips on this circuit board, but I still don't know what is in each one of those. This mystery will be solved when we read the contents of those ROMs in a EPROM reader. Since the Sony HB-F1XD uses the same set of S1985+MB64H444, I won't be surprised if the BIOS and SUB-ROM are also the same in the XV-J550 and HB-F1XD.

The encoder board have a more sparse look and, as said before, handles the AV inputs and outputs. There is only one IC on the backside of this circuit board.

The "other" board

The lonely IC on "other" board backside: SONY D1030

I did not found the usual SONY V70X0 chips inside the XV-J550, they are very common on MSX2 machines that have digitizer and/or superimposer features. But there are a lot of "washed" chips on the encoder board, any of those chips can be a V70X0 IC, so we can't really say that this machine hasn't the Sony video chipset.

Next post, more Sony video equipment!