MPC2000 and MPC2000XL LCD Screens

been following this thread and had to re-register after not posting here for years...

as a 2000 user since 98'(still using the same machine but with a new screen that i butchered from another near mint condition 2000) i gotta say it would RULE to have a VGA output upgrade....never ever thought this might happen.....

all the upgrades now such as internal card readers/hard drives/new screens were only a dream even a few years ago...

all the people making this happen - thankyou !!!

and i really hope this comes through to the end product...

Update time: We've got the prototype displays in. They look great! I have a couple short videos that I might upload, if I get the chance. This week, we set up our memory buffers to store bitmap images of the MPC data. The buffers are very fast and the motion on the LCD is flicker-free. This is important, as you don't want additional lag from processing the image.

The video is short. The reason is that my engineer on this project can't upload large video files. The camera is having trouble focusing on the blue backlight.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tWGa29Cit4


EDIT: We are not going with the multicolored display. We purchased four sample units and only ONE display worked properly. Additionally, the viewing angle was atrocious and proper color mixture could not be achieved.

NICE! That blue looks nice. So, will this also mean an increase of waveform loading in the trim window?

Tapuno wrote:NICE! That blue looks nice. So, will this also mean an increase of waveform loading in the trim window?

Unfortunately, it won't be faster than the MPC can send the data. I guess that was a little confusing.

word! keep up the good work!

That screen looks sweet bruh. Hope it pans out, good work.

awwww man, you guys are life savers... my screen is so bad to the point where if i didn't know how to move around the machine i wouldn't be able to use it.

glad to see this coming together for you guys, your about to make some money

but hope you guys also keep "affordable" pricing in mind.

let us know when we can start Pre-Ordering, i will take a blue one (or if you have purple).

UPDATE:

We are not going with the multicolored display. We purchased four sample units and only ONE display worked properly. Additionally, the viewing angle was atrocious and proper color mixture could not be achieved. Individually, red, green and blue looked OK. Greenish blue was fine, but any mixture with red was off color. There was no white - only a weird reddish-violet. Nasty.

The new displays are white LED backlit and are "transflective" which means they're sunlight visible. They are "positive" (black text on white) and are a good fit for the MPC.

However, we are experiencing some issues with the interface. Because we are communicating between the MPC, translating the code for the original display, then writing new code to be displayed, there are precious few clock cycles at our disposal to accomplish this without failure.

At this time, we're looking at other avenues to process the data path effectively. We're not giving up (we're engineers...we don't give up!), but we've lost a couple weeks fighting the MPC. In order to build a plug and play solution, we're not going to kludge the main motherboard in order to accomplish this task.

We will find another way - and it will be good.

Thanks for your support!

envisionelec wrote:UPDATE:However, we are experiencing some issues with the interface. Because we are communicating between the MPC, translating the code for the original display, then writing new code to be displayed, there are precious few clock cycles at our disposal to accomplish this without failure.

At this time, we're looking at other avenues to process the data path effectively. We're not giving up (we're engineers...we don't give up!), but we've lost a couple weeks fighting the MPC. In order to build a plug and play solution, we're not going to kludge the main motherboard in order to accomplish this task.

Oh I hadn't thought of that but yes that could be a problem. So what you're saying is is that the time between the MPC issuing a screen update and your translation process converting that data into a form that's displayable on your new LCDs is too long?

How are you doing the conversion? Presumably there's some kind of microcontroller on the display? Can you beef that up or must the solution be software based?

if/when you get this down, you're gonna have one hell of a business going.

there are still a lot of producers out there using the mpc 2000 & mpc 2000XL. not being able to get new screens for them is a big issue.

good luck and keep up the progress!

jellyjim wrote:
Oh I hadn't thought of that but yes that could be a problem. So what you're saying is is that the time between the MPC issuing a screen update and your translation process converting that data into a form that's displayable on your new LCDs is too long?

How are you doing the conversion? Presumably there's some kind of microcontroller on the display? Can you beef that up or must the solution be software based?

Not quite...

The picture below shows the issue. D15 (top) is the uCon debug output (normally an internal address). We're asking the uCon to interrupt its data handler on a WR transition. It does this, but then ignores CS1 and misses the next data frame. CS1 is the "chip select" line that signals the LCD when to begin writing 0x00, or the first pixel in the first column and row. Without that - the screen doesn't update.

The MPC requires a response from the LCD module before it will continue its tasks. We didn't know this and assumed the MPC LCD was just passing data along. (This is the kind of unexpected event that keeps amateurs from being successful...)

This very fast operation leaves little processor time to service successive functions, known as interrupts. Even operating at 64Mhz (>30x times faster than the OEM LCD), our interface processor couldn't keep up. We fixed it (in simulation) by adding a hardware latch before the microcontroller that holds the data for 500 nanoseconds (billionths of a second) while allowing the micro to focus on its main task.

The fun is in the music - but there's a lot of engineering behind your fun.

Haters care to comment? Didn't think so...

Wow that's cool! It's always neat to see the crazy talking going on in the machine.

Good show!

Good luck!

finnegan wrote:Wow that's cool! It's always neat to see the crazy talking going on in the machine.

Good show!

Good luck!

Thanks, your words are appreciated!

envisionelec wrote:Haters care to comment? Didn't think so...

yeah, when's the 3D version coming out? haha, just kidding man...

so does the bump in the road essentially mean you are back to the drawing board or does it mean there is a long delay, or what? how far is the backlight at the end of the tunnel?

mr_debauch wrote:

envisionelec wrote:Haters care to comment? Didn't think so...

yeah, when's the 3D version coming out? haha, just kidding man...

so does the bump in the road essentially mean you are back to the drawing board or does it mean there is a long delay, or what? how far is the backlight at the end of the tunnel?

It was a bump, we got it figured out. We're delayed maybe 2 weeks, but we're still looking at late March for the first units.