PICO9918 - a TMS9918A drop-in replacement powered by a Pi Pico (RP2040)

[visrealm]

@JasonACT has fixed the PICO9918 firmware to make the @TheMole's Alex Kidd water effect work. He found the scanline "register" should continue through 215 before jumping to 255.

 

Here's a video showing it in action:

 

 

And I've pushed Jason's changes to the repo

 

Edit: Apologies for the poor attempt to play the game. Attempting to play it via screen capture through OBS while reaching for the controller which is too far from the screen

 

I've attached the latest binaries which include a bunch of minor fixes (including this one) and Jason's hot firmware update feature. The files ending with "-sl" have scanlines enabled. The others are "clean".

pico9918-pcb-v0-3-gpu-dev-build-0-4-2-2-sl.uf2 pico9918-pcb-v0-3-gpu-dev-build-0-4-2-2.uf2 pico9918-pcb-v0-4-gpu-dev-build-0-4-2-2.uf2 pico9918-pcb-v0-4-gpu-dev-build-0-4-2-2-sl.uf2

Edited Sunday at 04:26 AM by visrealm

[TheMole]

Awesome, looks exactly like it should!

Thanks for testing.

[visrealm]

ArcadeShopper has PICO9918s in stock again.

• PICO9918 VDP replacement with 200mm cable
• PICO9918 VDP replacement with 300mm cable

I also have more available now in both 200mm and 300mm:

 

PICO9918 from Troy Schrapel on Tindie

 

Same product, same source, same price.

[M-S]

This is amazing, I didn't expect a Pico would be able to be fast enough to do this, is there a list of current issues and incompatibilities?

[visrealm]

2 hours ago, M-S said:

This is amazing, I didn't expect a Pico would be able to be fast enough to do this, is there a list of current issues and incompatibilities?

The Pico is a beast.

 

The official TMS9918A + 80Col firmware has no known incompatibilities or issues. 

 

The F18A compatibility mode firmware might have some issues with some software, but currently there are no known issues with software it's been tested with. Except where it's very render heavy, you can see minor artefacts (Zaxxon) but still very much playable.