FPGA Based Videogame System

[rezb1t]

Had issues with this on real hardware aswell, never got it to work. Needs huge sram amount. I have given up on this hack in saving point of view.

Have not tested it as rom on the Nt tho.

Interesting! Maybe it isn't a problem on the NT Minis end then

[killersquirel]

Interesting! Maybe it isn't a problem on the NT Minis end then

I will check mine out with this when I get home.

[Andromeda Stardust]

It means the cart is not equivalent to the actual system/carts which is why the core doesn't support it. I would guess that support for the cart should be possible to add though.

There's plenty of RAM to support 64kb bankswitch. Even the Bad Apple ROM (512kb) should be doable. Melody Plus (DPC+) games won't work because they contain a 70Mhz ARM coprocessor inside them. This is not currently possible to emulate via FPGA, so unless a coprocessor is added to the FPGA, Melody homebrew would require a Harmony or physical cart to run these ROMs through the NT Mini.

 

I'm interesting to see how the new "bus stuffing" demos run on NT Mini through an adapter board with Harmony cart. Many 2600 Jr and 7800 consoles do not even support the Bus Stuffing ROMs, so it would make a great litmus test for the Atari 2600 core, once the cartridge adapters are released. Pity I don't have the disposable income for an NT Mini at this time...

 

 

The harmony cart has an arm processor in it that basically sends out program info to the Atari. In order for it to work via sd loading, the Atari 2600 core would also have to "emulate" the Arm processor.

 

If there is a cart adapter made for the mini nt, then the arm processor in the cartridge would still do all of the processing it normally does and the nt mini can act like the Atari 2600 system does and everything will just work.

Yes, this. The ARM contained inside the Harmony cart is no slouch at 70Mhz, but modern tech is cheap. In fact it's borderline overkill for the power of the actual Atari system (the slow Atari CPU almost assuredly bottlenecks the ARM, allowing ever more impressive techniques such as "bus stuffing" which basically hijacks the TIA running games code directly off the ARM CPU pushing bits out the door).

[cacophony]

Interesting! Maybe it isn't a problem on the NT Minis end then

 

The Legend of Link has never worked on actual hardware and has been purely played in emulators up till now. It's supposedly a great rom hack so I was excited to hear that it ran on the Nt Mini. Hopefully kevtris can fix the save issue, or at least comment on the problem.

 

Update:

 

@kevtris, I can confirm that my saves aren't remembered for The Legend of Link

(more info on the game here: http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/2136/ and http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/nes/patches/2136readme.txt )

Though the readme is clearly a bit out of date...

Edited March 20, 2017 by cacophony

[Keatah]

I think kevtris should dump the Cyclone V and redesign the Z3K around the Xilinx XCVU440 Virtex Ultrascale+. So say we all?

[Reaperman]

Is anyone else having a difficult time finding the Atarivox bios files? I believe I found them in the source code of stella. Are they the .cxx and .hxx files that need to be renamed for the NT Mini 2600 core? If so, how do they correspond to the renamed files in the readme file? I'm relatively new here so I don't know if this is a question I should be asking in the forums. I'm still waiting for my NT Mini to arrive, so I don't have a way to test these. I'm just trying to get my SD card set up properly in the meantime. Thanks.

Yeah, I haven't managed to find them. This post seems to suggest that maybe we aren't going to(?)

Would this even be material people would object to passing around? I'm kind of hopeful that perhaps it becomes okay later on, though not being up on the 2600 scene, my hope isn't based on anything.

 

In other news, I've finally scraped together enough shekels to do this. So I guess this officially bumps my answer on the front page to $500. Got my shipping info today--that was faster turnaround than I had expected.

Edited March 21, 2017 by Reaperman

[Newsdee]

I think kevtris should dump the Cyclone V and redesign the Z3K around the Xilinx XCVU440 Virtex Ultrascale+. So say we all?

Are you willing to buy him one?

[+eebuckeye]

I started a NT Mini recommended core video settings thread.. hopefully some will find it useful to share video settings based on each core to maintain correct aspect ratio:

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/263514-analogue-nt-mini-core-video-recommended-settings-thread/

[ccovell]

More on the FDS RAM adaptor, I have another one with an HVC-02 board. It has a Hitachi SRAM for U1, and 4 DRAM chips for U3,4,6,7.

 

This RAM adaptor starts fine in the NT mini, but disk loads fail in the same way as my other one.

[Andromeda Stardust]

Are you willing to buy him one?

If Kevtris gets off his bum and sets up a Patreon account, we won't need to send him any hardware. Suppose a thousand people sign up on Patreon and give him a fiver a month. That five grand a month would be a ton of money for Kevtris to buy consoles, order prototypes, FPGA dev boards, etc, and if lots of people contributed, he could even cut back his professional hours to work on this stuff full time.

 

I'm not a tax man, but if the Patreon funds could be considered a business venture, and Kevtris kept all the receipts from money he spent on equipment, consoles, and prototypes, he could probably take the money he puts towards core development off his income taxes. But I'm not a tax expert so I have no idea if this is possible. It would be cool to if Kevtris posted his expenses online on the Patreon page, so we could see all the cool research we were helping to fund.

 

I would definitely donate a Lincoln a month to the cause.

[Newsdee]

I would definitely donate a Lincoln a month to the cause.

I thought you were joking because the XCVU440 seems to cost more than $40K per chip...

https://octopart.com/xcvu440-2flga2892i-xilinx-70849508

 

The Cyclone V should be fine. If the MiST can pull off a Genesis with 25K LE on Cyclone III then the 50K LE + upscaler approach of the Z3K should give plenty of space.

Edited March 21, 2017 by Newsdee

[Keatah]

Digikey lists the higher speed grade of the XCVU440 at just under $55,000 USD. The chip has the capability to run 10 A9 SoCs simultaneously, each with their own OS. But not at the full 1.8GHz.

[Andromeda Stardust]

I thought you were joking because the XCVU440 seems to cost more than $40K per chip...

https://octopart.com/xcvu440-2flga2892i-xilinx-70849508

 

The Cyclone V should be fine. If the MiST can pull off a Genesis with 25K LE on Cyclone III then the 50K LE + upscaler approach of the Z3K should give plenty if space.

The hell dude!?!? Who pays $40,000-$50,000 for a single chip!?!? Most cars are cheaper than that!?!?

[Keatah]

The bigger chips are typically used in AI research, machine learning, the new Azure Cloud servers from Microsoftm and development. You can develop complete SoCs on these. Intel validates new microprocessors on a whole room full of these. Exascale supercomputing computing.

 

The Azure Cloud, chock full of FPGAs, can sort and translate every dictionary of every language into every other language in milliseconds. As a background idle task. Without slowing other tasks.

 

Other uses are the radar systems on jet fighters, soft radios, the new 8K televisions, AI highlighting and marking of images in sports broadcasts. Internet routing. Petroleum research. And tons more, I'll leave it for you to plot your own research and learning course.

 

Meantime, school is in session! Understandable by the layperson.

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/262816-its-fun-to-play-on-the-f-p-g-a/?p=3723252

[Pal251]

@kevtris

 

I loaded jb1.7 and I still do not have audio on certain games and some games are missing audio. Such as Mario level 1-2 with music and sound effects. Soon as I exit to the overworld at the end the music comes back on. Does it on nes core along with cartridge.

 

It is being used with a Samsung monitor with these problems

[cacophony]

@kevtris

 

I loaded jb1.7 and I still do not have audio on certain games and some games are missing audio. Such as Mario level 1-2 with music and sound effects. Soon as I exit to the overworld at the end the music comes back on. Does it on nes core along with cartridge.

 

It is being used with a Samsung monitor with these problems

 

jb1.8 has the recent audio fixes so try that one before reporting issues.

 

http://blog.kevtris.org/blogfiles/ntm_firmware_verJB1.8.zip

Edited March 21, 2017 by cacophony

[Pal251]

Sorry didn't know 1.8 was out

[NE146]

Maybe I missed this, but how do you get to the system menu when running the cores?

[atmn]

Maybe I missed this, but how do you get to the system menu when running the cores?

Think its .. first the menu sortcut of your choice and then start.. ?

[+stephena]

Is anyone else having a difficult time finding the Atarivox bios files? I believe I found them in the source code of stella. Are they the .cxx and .hxx files that need to be renamed for the NT Mini 2600 core?

 

I'm not sure what you're looking for, but there are no BIOS files for AtariVox in Stella at all. The code in Stella simply emulates the bit-banging logic of the controller, and forwards this data to an externally-connected AtariVox (though a USB-serial interface). You still need the original hardware; there's nothing in Stella to emulate the AtariVox sound generation. There is code in Stella, however, to emulate the storage part of the Avox, whereby data can be loaded/stored in the device. In Stella, this is emulated with an external file on the host OS.

[Sneakyturtleegg]

 

I'm not sure what you're looking for, but there are no BIOS files for AtariVox in Stella at all. The code in Stella simply emulates the bit-banging logic of the controller, and forwards this data to an externally-connected AtariVox (though a USB-serial interface). You still need the original hardware; there's nothing in Stella to emulate the AtariVox sound generation. There is code in Stella, however, to emulate the storage part of the Avox, whereby data can be loaded/stored in the device. In Stella, this is emulated with an external file on the host OS.

 

Thank you for the clarification and your hard work with Stella!

[phoenixdownita]

I think kevtris should dump the Cyclone V and redesign the Z3K around the Xilinx XCVU440 Virtex Ultrascale+. So say we all?

The XCVU440tIt's a UltraScale the + version stops at half those "System Cells" for whatever reasons.

Also as the FPGAs get bigger they adopt more of a multi-core approach in which there are 4 or 8 big chunks inside and interconnect fabric among them.

 

Kevtris being an Altera guy would appreciated the GX/SX 5500

https://www.altera.com/content/dam/altera-www/global/en_US/pdfs/literature/pt/stratix-10-product-table.pdf

[simbin]

Kevtris, thanks for adding HVC-051 support. I tested some Famicom and Colecovision games last night and they worked perfectly. It's nice to finally put this controller to good use. :-)

 

Could you please add menu support and possibly some way to choose extra button functions?

[RampantOctopus]

HI Kevtris, I don't know if this can be done but I was wondering if it would be possible to give users the ability remap the order of the controller ports via your firmware? Maybe you've seen me venting my spleen about the retro receiver situation that arises when two (or more are in use) on the hardware thread, but I wanted to put your eyes on this because I think it's possible to ameliorate the issue (even though it's kind of 8bitdo's problem)...

 

It seems to me that if I can put the P2 reciever just a few inches away from P1, the problem goes away... Care to save the day? Thanks for your awesome work and consideration!

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/263325-analogue-nt-mini-hardware/?p=3723725

[NE146]

I just want to say I'm really enjoying the NT Mini. I have it plugged into my little 14" tv via composite and have been playing a lot of VCS on it and not getting any work done It's funny because I was explaining to the wife what it was, and she said exactly the same thing many have said.. "you spent $500 on that so you could plug it into that shitty tv?" But this is where I sit and like to play.

 

I'm far far from knowledgeable about displays, but Kev was 100% right man.. I A/B'd a real NES and the NT Mini and to my eyes the picture was exactly the same, colors, sizing, idiosyncrasies and all. Pretty cool after fiddling with console emulators (xbox, wii, etc.) for so many years, which even after resizing, rescaling, etc. on an old tv set, was never quite exactly the same picture (especially colors). Not that it matters too much, but it's cool to see.