Thursday, August 16, 2012

See my nice TV!

Today I got a nice small 4.3" Video-TFT with PAL and NTSC Support. Of course,  I had to try it out right away :)

Btw: The SID-Emulation is now on the FPGA, not an 'external' SwinSID anymore. Sorry for the bad quality, but that's all my smartphone has to offer!


The Demo is Dawnfall by Oxyron - but you know this anyways....

Friday, July 20, 2012

FPGA meets Arduino - Part 2


After a long break I did some major updates again on my C64 on an FPGA.

First, I mounted all the parts on a wooden board, so shortcuts and broken connections should not bother anymore.

Top Left: FPGA with the C64
Top Middle: AD725 Breakout with a Lowpass-Filter for the Sound
Top Right: AV-Out
Bottom Left: IEC-Breakout
Bottom Middle: SD2IEC
Bottom Right: (that's what's new) The Control Panel

Also the SID-Socket is gone (for now), sound is replaced by an FPGA-Implementation I found on the net. I don't know who originally coded this SID-Emulation, maybe it's someone of you? Here's the URL: https://svn.pacedev.net/repos/pace/sw/src/component/sound/sid/

And I wanted to add 2 joystick-ports with paddle-support, while not loosing more I/Os for the soon to come cartridge port. The solution you see on the bottom right: An Arduino Pro Mini together with an 1.8" Color LCD, some contol buttons plus 2 joystick-ports - connected using I2C to the FPGA.

With only 2 Pins used for the I2C, I have 2 joy-ports with (soon to come) paddle support (there are some analog inputs on the arduino), and a simple control panel to reset or mute the C64, as well as turn off borders and enable some debug visuals from the VIC-Emulation. The "Menu" is used to define the default kernal image.

Joysticks are updated ~30 times/second - which is fast enough for all games.


Saturday, February 25, 2012

FPGA meets ARDUINO meets C64

I always wanted to make my own Joystick - so I decided to connect an Arduino UNO together with a JoyStick Shield to the FPGA64. I know, not really my OWN Joystick, but at least I can program it the way I like (e.g. configure one Button for "UP" for Jump'n'Runs, RapidFire, WiggleMode for Decatlon .....)

Further I added one more Bit to the Video-Output, so now we have 9 Bits (3 Bit for each color). Much closer to the real thing than before!





Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Small but important preparations

Nono, this project is still NOT stuck! Just the pace is a little down.

To achieve the next milestone (which is an expansion port), I need to switch to another FPGA Board with more I/Os. I already have one here, but as I always tend to overread specs, I missed that there is no SRAM, but only an SDRAM on this Board.

And no, I'm really not in the mood to write an SD-Interface. So I've ordered some SRAM-ICs which I will hook up later.

In the meantime, I was able to programm and read the Flash IC (CIF) on the Board. So all Roms (Kernal, Basic, Charset) are no longer occupying valuable BlockRam.

If everything goes well, I will have an expansion port up and running still on 2012 :-D


Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Time passes by...fast....

Long Time no updates, which does not mean I abandonned the project.

In the meantime, I was able to find a solution to do the Level Conversion ...

This is the new FPGA-2-IEC-Board with the Level-Converter (5 Signals) on top:


(BTW: Those two boards are the first PCBs I etched myself using the method described here: http://thomaspfeifer.net/platinen_aetzen.htm)

Further I have found a new FPGA-Board with enough I/O for nice Stuff like a Cartridge Port or real Joystick ports. As the new Board does not have a VGA-Connector, so I need to make a new VideoConverter-Board too. This should keep me busy for the rest of this year....




Sunday, September 11, 2011

BadCopy by Emulamer - 66% success

As I've no real updates to present.....

Emulamer striked again at the Dekadence Dataparty 2011 with "BadCopy"

As of today, BadCopy does not work 100% on any emulator yet, also not on the Chameleon.

There seem to be 3 emufuxxors (Sprite, Music, "Picture") in this demo.

And well, it also fails on my FPGA :) While the sprite is correctly hidden, and the right music is played, the "Picture" shows the wrong charset... 66% success - better than nothing.


Saturday, August 20, 2011

Thank you for all the Help!

I got many Mail with inputs how to solve my problems - thank you very much for support!

So the first thing I'm gonna do is to build some level-converters as on this page:
http://www.rocketnumbernine.com/2009/04/10/5v-33v-bidirectional-level-converter/

First I will try to get the SID-Socket running with a real SID and BiDir (the current solution is "write only" to the SID).