 I have a new typewriter. I might have a bit of a problem here. So here it is. It's so huge I've had to bring it out onto my dining room table which is why I will probably sound quite echoey due to the absence of acoustic insulation in here. So what this is, if I open the lid, is a MOffice WP1 integrated word processor typewriter appliance. I believe this is a rebranded Brother WP1 which makes it the same lineage as the other word processor I have which has shown up on my channel a few times before. What this is, if I turn it on, is a turnkey unit that allows people to write out documents using the very nice rubber dome keyboard which apparently feels a bit like Topra if you've ever used a Topra which I haven't. And then you can either save them and load them from floppy using the integrated drive here or print them out using the high quality Daisy Wheel printer. Now I happen to know that on this model the printer is broken plus while it does take the same Daisy Wheels that my other brother device takes. It does not take the same ribbons and as a result I can't print anything on this anyway even if it did work. But I will briefly demonstrate just typing on this so I can dog chips over the lazy box. So this is the Swiss keyboard layout you can tell by the accent of the keys here and the fact that Z and Y are swapped which is kind of awkward when typing. This is an actual letter box CRT. My other unit has an LCD but compared to that this is so nice. I'm not sure how well it's coming across on the camera but it is beautifully crisp. It's a little bit fuzzy around the edges but it's really comfortable to use. The position of the keyboard is well judged and it feels really nice to type on. Unfortunately, okay what have I done now? Cancel there we go. Unfortunately the CPU in the computer that runs this thing is a rather slow Z80 and it's not really very nice to use. So like if I press return it doesn't keep up with my typing. If I insert text and of course it predates insert so it defaults to over type so I switch to insert. There we go. It says insert down there in German. All right, once upon a time there was an aardvark named Albert. So I'm still waiting for it to catch up and those beeps you were hearing are warning me that its buffer has filled up and I will have to wait while it catches up. You see it's actually missed the last few characters. E-R-T dot. So yeah that is no fun. The other unit I have is faster but it's still kind of slow. People did write long documents on these but compared to modern stuff it's not great. So to demonstrate the floppy drive. The floppy drive is also as far as I know broken. If I try to do something with a file it makes horrible noises. That's actually normal. The floppy drives and these things are weird but it correctly detects that the disk is not formatted. So I say yard to format it and it grinds away and then it gives up. It says the disk has failed. So that's not so great. So I excuse me. I would like to take this thing apart and see whether I can make it work rather better. So I am going to turn this thing off turn it over to access the works and show you what's inside. Well here it is with the lid off. Dismantling it was rather tougher than I was expecting. Not because it's difficult just complicated and unobvious. The knob here that you wind the paper on sticks out through a hole in the top case and you can't lift the case off because this is sticking out through it. I tried to take the printer off several times before just realizing that the roller itself just lifts out there are some plastic clips to remove it. So you're supposed to take the roller out then the top case comes off and only then can you dismantle the printer which is really awkward. Also the electronics is split between the top half and underneath. The logic board which is this actually lives in a hatch on the underneath of the machine and all these cables go through a hole in the bottom and connect up to the logic board. So you can't lift any of this lot off without also turning the thing over removing the logic board and of course you have to take the logic board out before you can unplug any of the connectors and free up the cables which is really annoying. But it's done I'm reasonably certain that I can put it back together again. I have lost a couple of screws inside the case so I'm going to have to turn this upside down and shake it at some point. But I think that I'm now going to move stuff through back to the workbench where I can get a proper look at it and show you what this thing is like inside. Well here it is on my workbench it's still far too big so you can only see it in pieces. What you're looking at here is the print mechanism. This is the printhead it moves back and forwards across the paper there's a belt down here and a stepper motor which you can't see in there. The print wheel the daisy wheel contains the actual type elements goes in here and locks into place. It then rotates and this thing has got a solenoid that hammers each type element against the paper. The ink cartridge drops in here and of course the only cartridge I have is the wrong size. This is the motorized drive that is supposed to drop into a cog like this in order to wind the ink ribbon along. Interestingly this printer has a second ink ribbon which is white for doing undoes which is interesting because given that this is a word processor you can undo all your mistakes actually in software and then you print out the correct version. So this suggests that whoever owned this was used to using it for typing in direct mode where you type on the keyboard and letters come out. Anyway the print unit comes out by unclipping some little things here and then it just lifts off and it's connected to this metal sheet revealing that thing is heavy and really awkward but revealing the insides. Now what we've got here is power supply the mains plugs in here the switch the on-off switch is under there. I don't know what this is a choke for smoothing maybe that kind of main stuff is kind of out of my comfort zone. A monster transformer from old-fashioned linear power supply so this does not use a switch mode I think this is the low voltage generator now I said I think because there is a little transformer here so who knows but I don't see any electronics on this so maybe not a switch mode it then powers the motherboard via this connector and the monitor via this connector. This is the monitor's analog board and I am really not an expert on these things but it looks pretty normal you've got the high voltage flyback transformer here couple of oh yes this connects to the what's this connect to this and this bundle of wires connect to the tube which is underneath this shield that will be the yoke which contains some magnetic deflection coils this is the electron gun itself this cable is supposed to plug on to the motherboard and it contains the actual signal and if you make that visible the really interesting bit is it's got a coax connection and I think that connection is likely to be composite video however I do not know what the other three wires are so that will be something to find out we have a focus control uh some other pots that that one's labeled height I can just see and I'm not at the right angle for the others but I have no intention of touching any of this because I want to live moving over here and I'll slide it back a bit this is the floppy disk drive it connects to the motherboard with these two connectors this is not a standard floppy drive connector I will remove and disassemble this to take a look inside but given how weird it is I don't think I'm going to go to very much effort to make it work I would like it to work because then I can use this machine to test the flux engine's ability to write 120k brother disks but given that a floppy disk in this thing will store 120k that's really not a lot so here is the logic board now this is quite different from the logic board of my other brother word processor which is a later generation you can most kindly describe the other logic board as economical it's a nasty yellow PCB which is single sided it's got very few components on it it's made out of very cheap PCB material it's clearly been stripped down to its minimum this is much more sophisticated which is interesting because this is the earlier version now it's the both machines are based around this chip which is a hd64 180 it's a modernized z80 it supports a larger address space and a faster clock rate it's got loads of onboard peripherals which is why it's got so many pins while the other board had ULA's gate arrays for doing nearly everything including the video signal this has a actual video controller chip and I've maybe I've been able to find a data sheet for it which is nice this chip is 8k of static ram maybe video memory but that's confusing because this chip is a ROM I don't know what's on it I would think that this would be a character ROM used by the video chip but if that was the case it wouldn't need 8k of video memory so that will require some investigation I really hope I don't have to take this chip off and read it over here we have 64k of ram this is DRAM all of this is generic TTL logic and drivers presumably to make the printer work I believe that this gate array here has got to do with working the printer this one over here I think is handling addressing sending requests from the cpu to all the various bits and pieces over here now there are a lot of connectors this one is the keyboard and I would expect this to be hooked up to a UART on the processor the processor I believe has two built-in UARTs it does have quite a number of pins though so that will need investigation too here we have the two connectors for the floppy drive these are wired up to this chip which I haven't been able to identify which means it's probably another gate array this would be the floppy drive controller I put controller in quotation marks because as I said earlier these machines do nearly all the floppy drive handling in software with a big chunk of code running in this thing presumably that's to make the floppy drive interface cheaper but if they're having to use a custom gate array anyway why not just use a off-the-shelf floppy drive controller because that way you'd be able to get more than 120k on a disk which is ridiculous up here we have a connector that's wired up to uh this is the safety switch on the lid so that it won't work the printer when the lid is open this one is the video out so I'll be looking at that we've got power in lots of pins I bet that this thing has separate power supplies for the heavy-duty motors for the printer and for all the logic this ribbon cable here connects to the printhead and these two to the printer itself however most interesting to me is over here this looks like a expansion connector and in fact when this board is in the machine this lines up with a cartridge slot on the side of the machine so clearly they were thinking about expansion but uh why then did they never populate it there should be a plug on here for some reason so who knows and there's another couple of connectors here which are also interesting um no help from the labelling it just says port two and r a one all these ports are numbered so and there's nothing there's no kind of maintenance manual online or anything but uh these actually know I look at it these do seem I think to be connected together um these then connect to tracers that also go out to this and then directly to the cpu so I have a suspicion that this is breaking out lots of useful cpu lines so uh this looks like eminently hackable particularly as this is the main software in two e-proms so hey I get two free e-proms which is nice so in order to make this do anything useful I'm going to need to provide power through this connector here and I want to know what all the pins do now one option is to remove the power supply from the chassis but I think instead I'm going to try and figure out what the power supply pins do by powering it up on the bench and poking at it with a voltmeter and then see if I can power the the logic board from my bench power supply because not really very comfortable with having um a live mains power supply sitting on my desk okay so I couldn't come up with anything better than this I've turned this switch on but the circuit breaker is plugged into is off because I don't want to touch this switch while it's live due to the big live copper wires coming out of it so let's provide some power like that now hopefully the logic board should now be live so we should be getting five volts here I would think yes we are um assuming that black is ground what do we get here 14 volts 12 volts nothing nothing judging by the tracks I think these two are both connected together I'm willing to bet that the red and black wires are five volts for the logic these two are high voltages for the printer mechanism and probably the floppy drive and that these two wires are common ground for both of them so after doing some track tracing a few interesting things have shown up one of which is that I was wrong about most of the ports so the two printer stepper motors plug into these two which are identical so if I were interested in the printer plugging them back in again will be interesting this is actually the video output port which is weird given that it's diametrically opposite the video controller chip I've traced the uh the output lines from this through to this chip which is a driver and then from there to this connector the two pins at either end of ground and the three middle ones are signal v-sync and h-sync so turning that into composite video won't be particularly straightforward I have found out that the uart pins from the processor here get routed through to this connector so this is a serial port however this the keyboard port does not seem to be connected to the uart so I am not sure where this goes yet I still have to figure out where all the pins go so I think what I want to do now is to add some header pins to this connector here because I want to be able to access the serial port okay moment of truth time let's apply some power and see what happens I have the oscilloscope hooked up to the video outline I hope so we just need to connect negative here and positive here and see what happens I'll just try it briefly at first whoops that looks like a signal to me so let me try and adjust this while not blocking the view now this should be this should be the video signal so this should be showing the pixel data and on power-up we get some text at the top of the screen and some text at the bottom this is honestly not really what I would expect to see nope I am not sure what I'm looking at okay let's try one of the other sync lines and see what we get there so power off let's try this one so this should be either h-sync or v-sync so there's a pulse there are lots of pulses still does not want to show us the frequency why is it doing that oh yeah it says top 47 volts that is incorrect this is because I have the crocodile clip set up rather than the 10x probe there's a way to change that not that yes I can't be bothered to try and find it this is either h-sync or v-sync so the horizontal tick size is five milliseconds so that should be 5 10 15 oh yeah of course period 16 milliseconds now I need to try and do that division in my head which I'm unable to do let's try the other one and see what we get there aha right this is much more high frequency therefore this must be the horizontal sync which again it is not showing the frequency why isn't it showing the frequency that's in blue is that because it's set to channel 4 there we go yes I must have been showing yeah I don't know what's going on but 16.4 kilohertz is exactly what I would expect for a tv frequency video which is what I would expect so let's go back to v-sync because that will give us the frame rate 60 hertz right so that's reasonable now because it's not composite video it means I can't just plug this into my AV to HDMI converter because that wants composite in I will be able to plug this into my OSSC when my OSSC arrives which I don't have it yet because hopefully I should be able to wire this up to a vga plug my actual monitor won't uh like this signal because it only does vga signals it wants a 30 kilohertz h-sync which this isn't okay let's have a look at the serial port I have hooked up my cheap and nasty logic analyzer to all the serial port lines I don't know what the pins do I mean I can trace them through back to the chip here and I know the chip pin out but I keep losing track when counting the pins so I'm just going to record them all and see what happens so if we press the run button on the logic analyzer and hook up the power and stop what did we get out I think not a lot okay I was rather hoping that we would see some debugging information but yeah uh it looks like it's not doing anything with it on startup that makes sense the port was probably put there for use by expansion hardware I don't believe this is lined up anywhere in particular in the case I will have a look at that in the moment okay so the next thing to do is to dump the ROMs I think so this is really simple it's just a matter of removing them sticking them in the NEPROM programmer I won't record that so back in a second all right I've dumped the ROMs which were smaller than I expected each one is 64k giving this a total of 128 k of ROM that will contain all the word processor software and the floppy drivers and so on I saw messages in French and German so presumably you can change the language by setting one of the configuration straps and I found four so far these two that one's got a solder blob on it and that one doesn't and these two I was expecting jumpers which is why I didn't see them earlier and unlike the later models they aren't conveniently labeled somewhere on the board so anyway I can't say to do English so I'll just leave it as German so I think I've come to the end of what I can do with the board the next thing to look at is the floppy drive further investigation shows that the floppy drive is probably a 240k model the same as my other brother word processor rather than the 120k one that I thought but whatever it is it's not working so I'm going to remove that from the chassis and have a look at it well that was miserable in order to get the floppy drive off you have to dismantle everything including taking the monitor out which is ridiculous there's this one screw under the floppy drive the floppy drive goes in the front panel like this so you have to remove the entire front panel with the monitor crt attached to it anyway it's off now so let's take a look now it's interesting the way it failed I was expecting that the belt would have died but given that it was sort of seeing something on the disc that makes me wonder if there's something else maybe it just needs to start to clean all right let's take the lid off it's a very odd floppy drive and what do we have um let me just grab a disc from somewhere so the disc goes in here let's get seated in place and ah okay that makes life easier so this is the mechanism we've got the flywheel uh-huh do you see what I see that's the belt oh oh yuck that's that's turned into sludge uh oh that's going to be awful to take off I was expecting to be able to just pull and have it unreal uh yes I can see you just see fragments of belt inside so I'm going to have to take the back panel off and of course this drive is so bizarre that a standard size belt even if I had any which I don't would be unlikely to fit here we go oh that's not too bad I haven't had to deal with the drive that's completely sludge-ified but gently press this stuff off look oops that was the bit but you see the way it's just smearing this is the motor and there should be a pulley that connects this to the flywheel and then there's the flywheel itself which has most of the belts wrapped around it so let's see if we can just scrape that off reasonably cleanly I think we might not be able to yeah this is just what happened to old belts the rubber degrades and they turn into disgusting sludge it's a decent size piece and it's sticky okay well that's cleft black smears everywhere so it's now time for the IPA I've been using this little bottle for ages at some point I'm going to have to get some more preferably quite a lot more okay so you should be able to see the black stuff on them spindle yeah this is not going to be fun so I think I'm just going to fast forward until that's finished okay it should now be relatively cleaned up so what we need is a belt now I don't have any drive belts but I have had good luck with these floppy drives with ordinary rubber bands which is not supposed to work so it's going round and allegedly these square belts will automatically unwrap or untwist themselves but let's just do that manually just to be on the safe side well that has not worked it's wrapped itself caught itself under the flywheel try that again yes might have problems here so let's give this a try and see if it works I'll just put the lid back on the floppy drive the board seems to slot under into these two tabs and then the screws do up it's really simple you've noticed how few components there are it's probably got dynamic head amplifiers and that's it okay and there is one other important thing to do which is to clean the heads so get the IPA out again I say heads what I really mean is head this only has one which is on the bottom the other side is a felt pad that just pushes against the disc so let's clean this off and call it done okay so now I want to test it somehow but this is so bizarre that the only way to do it is to plug it into the actual machine okay it's time to power it up I'm hoping that this thing runs off the same 5 volts as the rest of the board and not one of the high voltage lines so power we get a beep now it wasn't doing that before it's it's clearly going to prompt up okay it's not beeping anymore so let's try the file button which remember correctly makes the drive run and nothing right I wish I could see the screen but I can't it's unhappy about something interestingly the current has dropped from 480 milliamps to 340 let's just reset it again to see what happens yeah I think I am going to have to hook this up to the monitor to try and figure out what it's doing that's a shame so the beeping turned out to be because of the lid sensor it was complaining that the lid was open and it refused it to do anything if the lids open because the printer contains some pretty powerful moving parts and can make your life a you can make you have a very bad day if you get it wrong so with a paper clip I simply jimmy the sensor I'm not going to bother putting the printer back I'm not particularly interested in that but here we have the file menu I can go to new document type in something oh yeah and here's an interesting thing that I notice from my other brother typewriter that this does too there is no exclamation mark on the keyboard maybe you're just not supposed to be surprised when you're working on this so to save a file you press the file button you say yes I do want to save the file name hello and then document is being saved please wait and there we have our file and we can read it back again now the disk drive does make really unnerving moving noises when it does stuff so I'm not quite sure what's going on there let's copy it I want to copy to another disk so copy to the same disk new name new hello and it is 120k disk you see up there it says 115.7k put the original disk in the drive and press return now it gets the directory so far as I can tell the disk drive works so I'm now going to take the disk out and stick it in my flux engine and see if it's readable which will be interesting to find out okay so here I am now at my workstation I've put the disk that I just wrote into the drive so if I fire up flux engine using the new GUI tell it I want to read a brother 128 disk and hit the read button it will read now the 120k brother format is in fact 40 track and this is an 80 track drive so there is only data on every other track however because the brother floppy drive track alignment is rather bad we actually read all the 80 track tracks including the ones between the 40 track tracks which is where these bad sectors are coming from there we go so we should now have a good read I see no red sectors now it's gone through and de-duplicated everything so you can write the image to there will do fine yes replace close that and flux engine comes with a completely unrelated tool for looking at brother disks so there we can see the two files on the disk and I can extract one and this is the data file that the word processor wrote and I can write back files and sorry I can write back disk images and the brother will read them fine it's actually rather happier about images written here than on the word processor itself because these ones are properly aligned of course the big question is what am I going to do with this thing the z80 board actually turns out to be pretty decent it's got 64k of ram lots of ROM space a really rather nice video output particularly to the monitor I was expecting it to use composite video but it isn't so interfacing it to anything else might be tricky I still want to try and make it work with the ossc when it finally arrives that'll make doing developments so much simpler the floppy drive isn't worth a lot it's only 120k it's a weird format and interfacing it would be a pain as the protocol is mostly software defined I'd have to replicate a whole lot of software on the ROM to actually make it do anything I think the most useful thing I can do with this is to stick a raspberry pi in it wire it up to the internal serial port and turn it into a stealth writing machine the combination of screen and keyboard should make that quite nice I'm not particularly interested in the printer I have daisy wheel printers I don't have a ribbon for this and besides it appears to be broken so I think I'll just leave it with the printer out and try and come up with something to plug the gaping hole in the top of the case when I do do something with it I will report back I've uploaded the ROM dumps and things it's a shame I didn't get a dump of the character ROM but I really don't want to desolder that thing so until next time I hope you've enjoyed this video please let me know what you think in the comments