The Japanese engineer Kimoan built a hand-made MSX computer, not with FPGA but with hard wired general chips. It was named 肝八, Kimo-hachi. It can already boot with both MSX-BIOS or C-BIOS. You can also watch a demonstration launching Konami's Knightmare on Kimo-hachi in his website.

Kimo-Hachi consists of several print circuit boards. He broke down all functions of MSX into small units. Each of units corresponds a circuit board, and then they were built extension just like a building. The first board was given a special task; connecting to a host PC mainly for test or ROM image transfer. He says a cartridge slot will soon be implemented.

He built not only an MSX compatible machine but also classic arcade game clones such as Mr. Do. If you are interested in his unconventional and novel method to build 8-bit machines, just visit his web site.

Technical specifications:

MSX2+ compatible (incomplete)

Z80A

ROM 96 KB (MAIN, SUB, FM, KANJI-DRIVER)

RAM 1024 KB (Mapper-RAM)

8255

V9958

YM 2149 (AY-3-8910)

YM 2413

RP5C01

PS / 2 Keyboard Interface

Joystick port

KANJI ROM

SCC

Future improvements:

MEGA ROM controller (ASCII 8K)

Cartridge slot

Storage interface (under consideration)

Relevant link: Kimoan's web-site

Original submitted by ghost_jp