Board respin

Well, I was away for a little longer than expected, then got Flu and then went to Amsterdam so I now need a bit of recovery time 🙂  The idea was to get the boards assembled in China, but having talked to the other developers they really wanted a few changes in the way...

Countdown to production …..

Rather busy here, I will be in Asia next week so I will get 50 or so boards made. These will be the RevB board which has a few minor tweaks, so I am trying to finish testing the prototype PCB. Still no support from Chrontel (who make the DAC) who are strangely...

Too much beer ….

It’s been very sunny in Stockholm this week, so there has been much beer drinking and less time working on the bringup 🙂 I have made a minor patch to the board to fix the Chrontel power issues – still no word from them on this problem.  1080P and 720P...

Bring up continues

This week I have coded up the boot loader OSD. This took more time than I expected as a decent anti-aliased fixed space font is hard to find. I ended up writing some software which takes the output of Angelcode’s font renderer and converts it into a suitable...

DVI working

A brief update to say the video output is working well. I’ve tested DVI -> HDMI at 576i/50Hz (Pal) and analog out with a DVI to VGA cable. Both work fine, although I am upset that the M227WD TV chops off the outer few pixels in HDMI mode – but they are...

All Replay prototype hardware is now built

Phew, never again am I hand building more than one board this complex! I have been away on holiday at Glastonbury music festival, and then to recover from that I had another two weeks away. Now I am back, and apart from some contract work to finish (which pays for...

LCD PCB

I have been really busy finishing off some contract work, so I have not had much time to complete the Replay bringup. I am ordering some more PCBs so I did a quick layout of a daughter board for the LCD. It has an analog joystick and some buttons.  Really, it’s...

Large patch daughter board

I’ve finished the layout of the large patch card needed for testing with a real 68030 processor. The board is also used to test the IO on the main Replay card. The three daughter boards will go to manufacture tomorrow. Four main boards are now in existence and...

If IKEA made retro arcade boards …

Sorry, living in Sweden I couldn’t resist this. This is what a Replay parts kit looks like. This board is going off to another developer. Just to repeat, the production board will be available fully assembled only, you don’t want to try and build this...

Video I/O board

I’ve just been finishing off the layout of the 68K daughter board and the video IO board (pictured below) for the Replay card. The IO board contains audio RCA connectors, front mounted joystick and SVHS / composite video outputs. These are needed to finish...

Replay booted

It’s been a bit of a busy week, I was away for Easter and I am busy installing a kitchen, so I haven’t had as much time as I would like to carry on with the board bring up. However, I’ve got a rough cut of the boot software optimised for the ARM....

Replay lives….

Well, so far so good with the testing of the Replay board. The power supplies are all working well with good phase margin. I can configure the FPGA through the JTAG interface and flash the LEDs, so the clock generator is also working. I can find the ARM with the USB...

Replay build continues

Here is a picture of the Replay board mid assembly. The BGA has been mounted as well as all the small capacitors and most of the ICs. I have all the parts now, so I hope to have the board fully built for the weekend.

Replay BGA mounted

The first four prototype boards have had the FPGA BGA mounted. I’ll assemble the rest of the parts during the week, so we are aiming for a fully assembled Replay board for power on test by the end of the week. All the connectors and components I have tried so...

New server

There may be some disruption over the next few days as we are moving to a new server.

FPGAArcade development board

… is nearing completion (really, honest). Placement is complete and routing is going well. I hope to get some pictures up in a week or so. It is an ECX size board measuring about 14cm by 10cm and designed to fit in a case.  It has a large Spartan3E Xilinx FPGA,...

VIC-20 released on Spartan 3E board

I have updated the VIC-20 code to run on the Xilinx Spartan 3E board. It now supports cartridge images held in the on board flash memory. I have fixed a timing error in the T65 code and this has been updated also (Library page). 

Atari ST chips completed, work started on FPGA board

Well, it’s been a little while since I last posted any news. I have completed the four Atari ST ASICs and am co-simulating them. I am in final stages of designing a low cost FPGA platform which will be ideal for the games, but also for running the Atari and...

Atari ST ‘Glue’ custom completed

Arnim Läuger has reverse engineered some Konami custom ICs. As he has kindly released the firmware you can use the 28 pin modules available on the Parts page as replacements for these devices. It has been a busy month for me, I’ve been in Asia a lot again. I am...