Wanted: 5 people to look at an embedded book idea.

Just a few initial observations. First, what exactly are you trying to do with your book? Is this a lesson in VHDL/FPGA/Digital via retrogaming design examples? Or how historical hardware paved the way for today's technology? Or..?

Second, if you're intent is to accurately model vintage gaming hardware, why on Earth are you trying to bastardize them into a PowerPC or MicroBlaze? There's plenty of folks who have done free models of the older processors (6502, Z80, 8080, etc). It's not unlike trying to drive a nail with a belt sander.

Next, who is your intended audience? Anything Virtex-4 is quite expensive for anyone other than corporate, and cost-prohibitive for the casual programmer or student. Spartan-3E's are 1/50th the price and are more than enough ponies for emulating 80's LSI and MSI hardware. Ever try a belt sander with balsa?

Companies such as

have decent demo boards for a song with plenty of firepower to do what you need.

Lastly, be very careful of asynchronous logic when modeling some of the older game boards, especially ones with no CPU. Atari's PONG comes to mind. :-) FPGA's do not lend themselves readily to the asynchronous Rube Goldberg designs of yore because they (and I can only speak for XIlinx) cannot guarantee a minimum propagation delay anywhere. So, where the emulated design relies on race conditions you kinda have to fudge it and play tricks to get it to match a good synchronous design practice without losing the intent of the circuit.

Hope that helps at least a bit.

Cheers!

- Craig

Please don't restrict yourself to such 'modern' hardware; _real_ arcade games were TTL MSI :-)

Regards,

Michael Grigoni Cybertheque Museum

I think I've still got the first book I bought on video game design. A counter for the ball's X position, a counter for the ball's Y position, some logic to detect collisions and toggle the counter direction flip-flop, a couple A/D converters for paddle positions, and away you go...

--
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  Boys, you have ALL
                                  at               been selected to LEAVE th'
                               visi.com            PLANET in 15 minutes!!

None of the above exactly, but most like the first option.

History: A long time ago, I was interested in the Sega System 16 hardware for various reasons (Thierry Lescot, author of the Sys16 emulator, has at least one of my old Golden Axe boards :) I got all fired up and began writing an "emulator for a nonexistent piece of arcade hardware". This was called System N, and the intent was to use it as a generic 2D gaming engine. It was written in C with PPC assembly (for MacOS 9). It implemented two 8-way joystick interfaces with three buttons apiece, three 16bpp 32x32 tile layers for parallax effects, and a text layer on top of that.

More recently I've become interested in lashing some of the same sorts of capabilities to various micro systems. It occurred to me that it would be extremely useful to have a VHDL model of, say, the ZX Spectrum's video hardware. It would also be useful to me to have a

64x64 3-layer palettized tile graphics system with an 8x8 text overlay and at least 16 128x128 sprite channels. But not specifically for anything to do with retrogaming.

Using the old game hardware as historical info puts the ideas in context.

No, it's not the intent. I did say this was not an emulation book. The intent is to develop various graphics and audio output hardware that does the same sorts of things as various arcade, console and home-computer equipment.

This sort of material has applications in non-gaming sorts of arenas. For instance, simulations (of the industrial-equipment-training variety, not flight sims), digital instrumentation, and test equipment.

Again, the aim is not to emulate anything. I'm well aware of the free cores - but that's not what I need.

The ML403 EDK is < $1,000. While not cheap, it's not prohibitive either. I did say this wasn't an introductory-level book... :)

It really boiled down to this board or an equivalent monster from Altera. I already have the Xilinx board as part of some other writing I'm doing, and Xilinx is -probably- going to be an avenue for marketing the book. Done deal.

Ever try making a 1:1, fully operational model of a C-130 out of balsa? :)))

The oldest part that's currently in the TOC is the AY-3-8500, is that ancient enough for you? ;)

The only place I've had access to them was in Uni, and they get it at academic prices too.

--
Wing.

That EDK is what, $900-$1000 USD? I don't picture many individuals of intermediate to advanced skill levels shelling out that much just to recreate old games. And I don't see people who want to recreate old games shelling out that much. Good luck!

~Dave~

"larwe" escribió en el mensaje news: snipped-for-privacy@i40g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...

Interesting subject.

Please, make sure the whole thing can be programmed with the Webpack, or some other free package. I don't think hobbyists, and students are willing to pay an anual subscription for a full ISE in addition to the development board.

Best regards

Josep Duràn

• It is Much_a_s Gracias unless you want to refer to Terminator or David Beckam or ... ;-)

It's just under $1k retail. Assume that you already have suitable hardware, though. The idea is to lift segments out of the book for your own evil purposes. I'm using the ML403 because I like it and I got it "free".

???

so you're going to go into detailed design of a blitter and sprite generator?

I would think that anyone with the hw available to play with this would already be able to throw together their own blitters.

Are you trying to create a vhdl library for reuse?

I wasn't actually going to put a blitter in there, I was focused more on tile-based graphics (i.e. no need to blit memory around - because the only mem that actually changes is a kilobyte or two of tiles).

To a certain degree it's a cookbook. The point is to capture interesting techniques that were used back in the 80s and 90s.

Hi Larwe,

I think this is a great idea! I will be working soon (and will be getting cash) so I will be looking out for your other book!

I have always loved video games ever since I was a child (particularly my firs tsystem being a Sega Genesis). Video games was what got me interested in digital electronics, particularly microprocessors.

The tile engines I am sure can be done in VHDL without too much overhead. Also the YM synthesizers can be done too, YM chips really are just a bunch of LUT's and weighted summers.

-Isaac

Good! Did you find that internship, or what?

Some of Taito's systems from the early 90s achieved AMAZING effects with those Yamaha chips. Really incredible stuff. Look at Crime City, for example.

Not really, just a general summer job. I will be applying for a work term after this coming year :).

Hey that game is pretty fun! I like those side scroller beat em ups :).

Taito is definitely one of the names that ring a bell. I to this day am still very impressed with the sound of FM synthesizers. The Genesis was nothing spectacular since the FM chip it used was I think a low cost version, but the arcade ones simply blow me away.

I find some of SNK and their NeoGeo games to also have good soundtracks that are a very good mix of FM/DAC.

I now have my five sacrificial victims^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hesteemed reviewers, thank you. So while I appreciate any feedback and suggestions, the "vacancies" for paid reviewers are filled.

I'd just like to point out that I do not reasonably anticipate every man, woman and child on the planet to purchase this book. I don't expect everyone to /like/ this book, in fact.

If I was writing the universal book, it would be a torrid tale of lust, swashbuckling adventure, religious serenity, murder, vampirism, fervid calmness, death, resurrection and a journey of self-discovery, with overtones of conspiracy theory and a good solid scientific basis. That would get me on the Oprah Winfrey show fersure. Pity I can't stand the woman.

That's fine. Just make sure it fits into a Spartan-3E Starter Board. Hmmmm, where is that VHDL module for vampirism ...

~Dave~