ALF Sound Cards

This is a recreation of the ALF MC-16 and MC-1 sound cards in KiCad.

For the MC-16, I had originally produced a schematic from the original documentation and redid the PCB layout, but there is an Applefritter thread with gerbers reconstructed from the original layout, so I recently (2 Aug 23) imported those and mapped KiCad components onto it to get something much closer to the original.

Since the 1.782-MHz crystal specified in the MC-16 schematic is hard to come by nowadays, the design has been altered slightly to accomodate a programmable crystal-controlled oscillator in a DIP-14 package. To use the original configuration with a 74LS324 and a crystal, bridge JP1 and cut JP2.

The MC-1 PCB layout was reconstructed from the original layout. The last page of the schematic/PCB PDF was loaded into GIMP and separated into CMYK layers. The cyan (top) and magenta (bottom) layers were inverted, thresholded, and saved to separate PDFs. These were then vectorized in Inkscape and saved to DXF files that were imported into the KiCad PCB file as user layers to guide component layout and trace routing.