Sharp Manager is an application for connecting some vintage Sharp pocket computers to your Windows desktop PC. It works together with an Arduino to connect the Sharp computer to a USB port on your desktop. With this hardware and software, Sharp Manager emulates a CE-126P cassette and printer interface and a Sharp CE-140F floppy drive. It has only been tested with a Sharp PC-1401 and a PC-1403 however the disk emulation should work on any device that supports the CE-140F.
Requirements
To use this software you will need the following:
- An Sharp Pocket Computer
- An Arduino (Arduino Nano)
- Sharp Pocket Tools (Recommended)
- A PC running Windows 10+
Features
- CE-126P Printer Emulator: Print from your pocket computer to your desktop
- CE-126P Cassette Emulator: Load .tap files into PC-1401 and PC-1403.
- CE-140F Floppy drive Emiulator: Treat a folder on your desktop as a floppy disk.
Sharp Manager also supports uploading pre-compiled firmware to a number of different Arduino models.
Download and Install
You can download the latest release installer from here:
Download the above file and open it to install Sharp Manager on your computer.
Arduino Connection Diagram
| Arduino Pin | Direction | Sharp Pin | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| GND | 3 | Electrical Ground | |
| D2 | ← | 4 | Busy |
| D3 | ← | 5 | Dout |
| D4 | → | 6 | Xin |
| D5 | ← | 7 | Xout |
| D6 | ← | 8 | Din |
| D7 | → | 9 | ACK |
| D8 | ← | 10 | SEL2 |
| D9 | ← | 11 | SEL1 |
All the pins that are output from the Sharp Pocket computer must be connected to ground with a pull down resistor. My build uses 480kΩ resistors but most values should work.
Documentation
Internal documentation for the project is available by clicking the link below:
Getting Help
You can get help with this application by using the Issues tab in this project.
Building the Project
This project consists of two parts, the Arduino Firmware that drives the connections to the Sharp Pocket Computer and the Sharp Manager desktop application that communicates with the Arduino over USB.
Building the Arduino Firmware
The Arduino firmware is located in the Arduino directory of the project. This can be built with the Arduino IDE and installed directly onto an Arduino. For this project, I've chosen an Arduino Nano but most models of Arduino should work without issue. You can edit the Sharp.h file to change the pin mapping if necessary.
Building SharpManager
The desktop component is written in C# for .NET 6.0. It can be compiled by the community (free) edition of Visual Studio 2022. Simply open the main solution file in the SharpManager directory of the project and select Build Solution.
Acknowledgements
- Norbert Unterberg for reverse engineering the tape protocol
- Fabio Fumi for his Sharp CE-140F emulator for ST-Nucleo
- Everyone in the The Sharp Pocket Computer Faceback group