Sharp MZ-1500 Upgrades

Amongst the machines I am currently renovating is a Sharp MZ-1500, the Japanese successor to the venerable Sharp MZ-700. It was generally only available in Japan and offered more advanced sound, graphics, builtin expansion bay and a QD drive. This machine not only provides the ability to run MZ-700 software via a compatibility switch but adds a 24KB Programmable Character Generator allowing for full colour pixel level graphics and more advanced games along with a stereo programmable sound generator for advanced audio.

It is wrongly believed that the MZ-1500 was a Japanese 'MZ-800', the circuitry and the functionality are different, they only share the basic looks.

I'm looking forward to seeing if I can further upgrade it with the MZ-800 tranZPUter SW developments which will provide additional functionality including 512K RAM, SD Card services and a faster CPU.

The MZ-1500 only has colour video output with a basic graphics/Programmable Character Generator based pixel graphics so it may make sense to see if the tranZPUter SW-700 v1.3 can be added to advance the graphics capabilities to that of the MZ-800 and above. All depends on space within the casing as everything else is pretty much the same as the MZ-700.

Working with this machine I hope to use the knowledge gained to improve the Sharp MZ Series Emulator.

Please click a link on the left to see details of the machine renovation.

Where I have used or based any component on a 3rd parties design I have included the original authors copyright notice within the headers or given due credit. All 3rd party software, to my knowledge and research, is open source and freely useable, if there is found to be any component with licensing restrictions, it will be removed from this repository and a suitable link/config provided.

This design, hardware and software, is licensed under the GNU Public Licence v3.

The source and binary files in this project marked as GPL v3 are free software: you can redistribute it and-or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

The source files are distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.