Dedicated word processors are not something we see much of anymore. They were in a weird space: computerized, but not really what you could call a computer, even in those days. More like a fancy typewriter, with a screen and floppy disks. Brother made some very nice ones, and [Chad Boughton] got his hands on one for a modernization project.
The word processor in question, a Brother WP-2200, was chosen primarily because of its beautiful widescreen, yellow-phosphor CRT display. Yes, you read that correctly — yellow phosphor, not amber. Widescreen CRTs are rare enough, but that’s just different. As built, the WP-2200 had a luggable form-factor, with a floppy drive, ̶m̶e̶c̶h̶a̶n̶i̶c̶a̶l̶ clacky keyboard, and dot-matrix printer in the back.
Thanks to [Chad]’s upgrade, most of that doesn’t work anymore. Not yet, anyway. The original logic controller of this word processor was… rather limited. As generations of hackers have discovered, you just can’t do very much with these. [Chad] thus decided to tear it all out, and replace it with an ESP-32, since the ESP32-VGA library is a thing. Of course this CRT is not a VGA display, but it was just a matter of tracing the pinout and guesstimating sane values for h-sync, v-sync and the like. (Details are not given in the video.)
Right now, the excellent mechanical keyboard (mostly) works, thanks to a Teensy reading the keyboard matrix off the original cable. The teensy sends characters via UART to the ESP32 and it can indeed display them upon the screen. That’s half of what this thing could do, back in the 1980s, and a very good start. Considering [Chad] now has magnitudes more compute power available than the engineers at Brother ever did (probably more compute power than the workstation used to program the WP2200, now that we think of it) we’re excited to see where this goes. By the spitballing at the end of the video, this device will end its life as much more than a word processor.To see what he’s got working so far, jump to 5:30 in the video. Once the project is a bit more mature, [Chad] assures us he’ll be releasing both code and documentation in written form.
We’ve seen [Chad]’s work before, most recently his slim-fit CD player, but he has been hacking for a long time.We covered his Super Mario PLC hack back in 2014.
Nice work, [Chad]!
What a lovely CRT!
I have a few variants of these machines. NONE have a mechanical keyboard. But the screens are fantastic
You’re right, this one doesn’t either. Hopefully I didn’t say that in the video. It’s a nice keyboard regardless, nice and noisy too.
Reviewing, I think that was my bad. I heard it clacking and my brain decided to (incorrectly) fill in the blank. I’ll revise the article.
Tyler, thanks for a great article. I hate to be the one to point this out, but there’s a minor grammatical error in one sentence: “As generations have hackers have discovered” should be “generations OF hackers”.
And [Chad] – cool project. Definitely falls into the “because it’s there” school of “why do this?” in terms of practical use, but who cares? :)
Thanks, David, I’ll fix that too.
Replying to myself because apparently I can’t reply +1 levels down to Tyler directly…
Is there a “Corrections” link for Hackaday? It feels slightly prissy and cruel to point out typos & grammar errors in the public forum of the comments. I haven’t found one, but then, these days I’d probably struggle to spot an elephant right in front of my face, painted neon pink and playing a vuvuzela…
The Register uses a “Corrections” web form, which seems like a good solution; no need to fire up a separate e-mail client, and it makes it quick & convenient to report bloopers.
Did this have a Z180 or HD64180 like some of the other Brother word processors? (I didn’t go through the video link yet)
My friend had a WP-75 he inherited from a family member and that it had a little storage compartment for 3.5″ floppies struck me as both a useful feature but also very simple.
I believe the 2200 has the HD64180 and the 720kb dos compatible floppy drive.
He should put a CP/M machine on the esp32!
RunCP/M is already ported to the esp32: https://github.com/MockbaTheBorg/RunCPM
These word processors should have been CP/M machines in the first place.
The original hardware can run CPM(ish) too
https://cowlark.com/cpmish/arch/wp2450ds/README.html
I got one off the curb years ago, I need to dig it out. The CRT was the reason, maybe for a spectrum display.
If you’re not familiar with the history of these – the intro to this CRD video is pretty informative (and the rest of it is pretty wild!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lUhDo7euPs
It’s been a while, but I have played around a bit with reversing these.
I have a prelimary mame port from ~6 years ago that gets far enough along to play the brother version of tetris (and some of the other ROM software) when emulating a 2450DS.
Docs: https://github.com/kfazz/brother_wp2540ds
Mame: https://github.com/kfazz/mame_brother_wp
apl test: https://github.com/kfazz/apl_tests
From what I remember, the FDC is a little special (had to reverse the expected behavior from os disassembly). Also, never quite figured out what the 2 autoincrement bits in the VIDC control register were for.
With a bit of circuit bending (cutting and wiring the unused uarts on the cpu), these could make for some neat dumb terminals.
Unfortunately (at the time), ghidra had poor (read almost no) support for the z180’s address space above 64k, so tracing the brother OS far calls (which it does a lot via RST) was very painful.
He’s not unattractive, but I’d rather see more shots of the CRT than 90% his face.
Yeah I agree with you, I wish I showed more of the unit than myself. Next time I do a video I’ll lean more that way
My writeup on how to drive the CRT is now up: https://www.instructables.com/Hacking-a-Brother-CRT-Word-Processor-With-an-ESP32/