mos6507's Blog - Chimera as a multicart

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I'm definitely jumping the gun here but I'll make a brief update about Chimera progress since we're at a reasonably significant milestone.

 

Over the weekend I got my version 10.0 cart. The board design has proven to work well so far, with only one jumper wire required. I have now tested a sample game of every banking scheme successfully on Chimera. The games currently load off of microSD in response to a serial terminal-style interface. One interesting aspect of the loader is it has the capability to "interrupt" an existing game in progress and switch to the new one. I don't know how reliable this is but it is really cool not having to power-cycle, and should eventually speed up debugging cycles for developers.

 

Most of the banking schemes fit into one CPLD core file. The Supercharger and a few others are in a secondary core file. The plan is to have the system automatically reprogram the CPLD as required when going from game to game. This introduces an unavoidable 10-20 second lag inbetween, but should otherwise be transparent to the user. This is a byproduct of containing costs on the system. The CPLD is rated at 10,000 rewrites so if people are particularly concerned about wearing it out, or just don't want to sit there and wait for it to be reprogrammed, people will have to schedule their play sessions to avoid ping-ponging from core to core. Originally we thought we might have several core files, but only having two should minimize the inconvenience.

 

So the next milestone is to get this CPLD auto-rewriting feature working. After that, we are going to largely deprecate the terminal menu (although in the meantime it's being prettied up in ANSI like a pseudo-BBS) and try to get an onscreen menuing system up and running. In order to get the menu up and running a lot of the new Chimera-native functionality will have to be working successfully. So after that, all that will be remaining is to plug in the new Chimera features one by one. Then the cart should be at least ready for open beta. I'm really looking forward to posting a video of a working menuing engine. Explaining it will help illustrate a lot of the Chimera architecture which new games will be able to use.

 

I'm crossing my fingers that Delicon will see this through to fruition without another hiatus.

 

 

 

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