As regards the SoC VDU - Martin has a substitute part a DM86S64CAB which he has managed to get - not sure how much stock he has but, its a useful source with the PCB.
I think the idea of collecting articles and links in a thread is great - this one is sort of doing it. I have been pulling together a set of personal notes on topics which may help form an FAQ. A wiki would be ideal somewhere perhaps...
That's funny I describe the MK14 to people as the Arduino of 1978 so a model train controller seems ideal...
I am also guilty of not doing any coding (yet) - as a Z80 programmer I am having a bit of a shock reading what is available on the SC/MP II first!
The Alphanumeric LCD display ties in very well with my first intended project which is to port my adaptation (which is 256 Z80 bytes) of an i2c and RTC driver from the Next! That is what I am working up to... now I have actual hardware and a cross assembler.
Other magazines of the time may have something of interest if not directly MK14 then SC/MP (E.g. Elektor who had the designs for a machine based on one if I remember correctly). One I quite fancy having a go at is 2 dimensional version of Conway's game of life described in Issue 12 of the 1978 Byte:
https://archive.org/details/byte-mag...78-12/page/n69
The magazines suck up research time ( I have to stop )...
I have also just been naughty and bought a copy of Issue 2 of Personal Computer World (May 1978) as they are not archived online anywhere. It has a review of the MK14 in it (I noticed as the listing included the contents page) which I will obviously scan - interestingly it is written by Nick Toop. I think it may be the same person who in PE of April 1979 provides an MK14 diagnostic program written in NIBL BASIC - he is described as working for SoC then and is credited as the designer of the VDU board... He has a further article in the Dec 1979 PE issue with an Output Flag multiplexer and falling man animation for the VDU.
The bit that really interested me in the above is the mention of NIBL at SoC I wonder if they had somehow put the ROMS (2 off 2316A for £46.90 from Greenbank Electronics) into the MK14 memory map or were using a more powerful SC/MP system. That started me thinking that if the top four address bits were latched and some mods to the onboard address decoding were done it could appear as another 4K Page... only problem would be the SCIOS reliance on the RAM at FFF appearing to wrap below 000. A future project...