Subject: Re: [stella] 2600 on-a-Chip new site From: Adam Thornton <adam@xxxxxxx> Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2002 21:53:30 -0500 |
On Wed, Aug 21, 2002 at 09:27:43PM -0500, Carlos Lopez wrote: > I will be glad to help anyone to have a better comprehension of the TIA > internals. But, as I mentioned on the project site, my plans are to design > somewhere in the near future a portable 2600. That doesn't allow me to share > the VHDL code at this time. Maybe when I have completed the design and the > portable 2600 becomes a reality, I will release the code. Fair enough. I implore you, however, to make your portable 2600 a bit, well, more than a 2002 recreation of the VCS. I had had some ideas that would, I think, not take a whole lot of silicon or discrete components and would make it a device I'd be more likely to use. a) RS-232 interface, so we could download a game from our PCs rather than simply loading it via the cartridge slot; this would also take a bit of logic to recognize the different bankswitching formats and implement them, but not a whole lot. The Cuttle Cart does this. b) A/D converter and audio interface. Same argument, but for Supercharger games and/or WAV/MP3 versions of games. Again, done by the Cuttle Cart. c) Built-in "Cheetah"-like functionality. Look at Bob Colbert's pages. Basically, once you've loaded a game, zap the bytes in it to modify its behavior; kind of a tiny hex editor written in 6502 assembly, letting you modify the memory contents. If either a or b is implemented, it's really not necessary, but it's a cool hack. d) Composite video out, stereo audio out. It looks like you're already planning this. e) Multicart support. RAM is pretty cheap. A smallish interface that let you load multiple games into RAM (with a or b above) and then select among them would make this design a little more useful when divorced from a VCS cartridge library. f) Some sort of mechanism for debugging. Since all the VCS hardware is emulated anyway, it seems like it shouldn't be that hard to externalize some interface to it for the use of homebrewers who want, effectively, a VCS hardware debugger. I haven't given much thought to this, so I might just be babbling. Adam ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archives (includes files) at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/ Unsub & more at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/
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