Namco CUS34 reverse engineering
I’ve been shipping Namco CUS34 replacements for a while and the majority of the engineering work was done over 10 years ago. Reverse engineering the silicon by decapsulation of the die, taking pictures and manually tracing them is best way to understand what is going on, but it’s very time consuming. Most of these chips are quite simple and have little internal state – but to make sure all paths are covered I’ve started to retest the chips using a little jig designed by my friend Wolfgang. This sits on top of an AMD Zynq board, and allows each pin to be driven and measured.
The test framework is written in Python, and then wavedrom (https://wavedrom.com/) is used to draw the waveforms.
Sometimes you need a bit more timing information, so a logic analyser is also hooked up. This lets me see which edges are used.
A month or so ago I thought all was good – and then somebody tries it in a ToyPop board… ToyPop and Libble Rabble use the Namco System 16 Universal hardware.
Unlike the other boards which use this chip – Dragon Buster for example – pin 13 is tied low rather than high. This seems to put the chip in an entirely different mode. As far as I know, no schematics exist for these boards, so a brute force reverse engineering effort is underway.
I dug out my old adapter board from 10 years ago. This let’s me isolate each pin and with the logic analyzer – here the big Agilent 1680 – I can work out which pin is an input, which is an output etc.
I’ve got to fit this around Replay2 design work – more on that shortly, but I hope to be done soon – and I’ll document it publicly.
/Mike
New toy – Agilent N5998A HDMI/DVI Analyser
Well, more time has passed. I had surgery on my jaw a few weeks ago in an attempt to remove part of a wisdom tooth that was left behind a few years ago. I’m in recovery, but it really knocked me out for a bit.
We are making good progress on both the DE10-nano support and Replay2 – more info shortly.
I saw the C65 group had invested in a HDMI analyzer box and I decided we should do the same. It’s something I’ve been considering for a while as the Amiga core on R1 has some issues over DVI with interlaced video and we’ve seen problems with the Arduino Vidor output as well. I want to make sure R2 works without any issues, so sometimes you just need a new toy :
Cheers, and Happy Halloween!
/MikeJ
Replay2 and DE10-nano support
Sorry it’s been a bit quiet here for the last few months. I had to move flat three times since January and all the retro kit has been in storage. Work has been intense and it’s only the last week or two that life is calming down enough to get the Retro stuff back on track.
The initial plan was to launch our new board (Replay2) at the Revision demo party, but it was not to be. The Xilinx Ultrascale parts used on it arrived a few months ago, but the design and PCB layout is complex to say the least. Replay2 is an Mini-ITX form factor (170mmX170mm), so it can fit in standard cases. We have build options of 1 to 4GB of DDR4 memory on the processor system, and twin 8bit DDR3 128MByte memories on the FPGA. Digital video out, as well as 30bit analog RGB is provided, as well as a display port connection for developers.
We also provide USB3.1, a PS/2 connector (supports Amiga keyboard protocol) and Gigabit Ethernet. There are also some exciting mass storage options. The device also has a GPU on board we intend to fully utilize both from the GUI and from the Amiga core.
The Replay framework is being updated to support the board. Currently the same core can (in most cases) be built for Replay1 using Xilinx ISE, Arduino Vidor 4000 using Intel Quartus and now Replay2 using Xilinx Vivado. Our build system and Jenkins CI handles all this and rebuilds all cores that need it when a git commit occurs.
The cores we designed were always open source, and many have been ported to other systems, most notably Mister based on the Terasic DE10-nano platform. You get a lot of FPGA for your money there, and Mister has been very successful. While Replay2 is the system that I want to own, it is going to be more expensive. I also don’t always agree with some of the core changes which occur during “porting” (I’m a bit of a purist) and It occurred to me that we have already done most of the work needed by supporting the Vidor 4000 board. The SOC integration we need to do for Replay2 anyway, so we made a decision to support the DE10-Nano hardware and bring the Replay ecosystem to everybody.
I don’t know how long this will take, but I expect to have the Amiga core with a new RTG running shortly. It’s likely you will need to have a separate sd card, but it may be possible to run a different binary and coexist with the Mister designs. We have had many features for years that are only now appearing on other platforms, for example we have an ini file per core which configures the menu system and uploads all ROMs – so released binaries do not have any IP issues. We have a scalar under development as well, but it will take us a little while to catch up in other areas. The neat thing, is all this work to support DE10 is also applicable to R2 and we will of course add third party cores with the authors permission.
My aim since the first design releases (nearly 20 years ago) was to bring FPGA retrogaming to the masses, and I never thought it would become as mainstream as it has. Our code is currently being moved to github. Some of it is already available https://github.com/FPGAArcade/ and all designs will be public as soon as we sort out the licensing and finish tidying up.
/MikeJ
CRT Characterization and Emulation
I think many people agree that retro hardware looks best on CRTs from the same period. The downside is CRTs are expensive, bulky and hard to get hold of now.
I’ve got a small Sony PVM I use for testing, and a large Sony broadcast monitor that is most often used as a coffee table to be honest. Modern screens have a different gamut (colour space) but the gamut is generally larger than the Rec601 EBU spec for the CRT.
I’m lucky enough to have access to some software from Light Illusion and a high-end probe on loan. I’m using Replay1 as a patch generator controlled by the calibration software over a serial link. This wasn’t my initial plan, but it’s almost impossible to get PAL analog video out a modern PC. Replay1 has a reasonable quality analog output stage, filter and line driver – but it’s good to get any artefacts here included in the calibration.
I’m running an initial profile of the CRT at 80 nits, a little lower than usual, to stop any blooming. I’ll then run a profile of a standard LCD with default settings, probably one of my Dell panels. One of the really cool things about the ColourSpace software is give these two datasets, it can then generate a LUT (look up table) which will make the LCD look like the CRT. https://www.lightillusion.com/3d_lut_guide.html
I can then profile the LCD with the LUT applied by the tool, and see how far off from the CRT it is.
This data can then be built into the FPGA framework and be available to all cores. It’s likely a colour matrix and linear look up table will be sufficient, but I want to capture as much data as possible while I have the kit.
/MikeJ