make a loader where you can select your game fromOriginally Posted by Calpis
the loader will access that specific address, and will wait for let's say 1s
in that 1s, the game will be loaded to s(d)ram, and from there it is read
oh, and bank switching is easy...I did think this out already...
if MBCx chips is what you mean, then yes, I'm prepared
Last edited by pit; 12-03-2007 at 10:52 PM.
Is the loader in ROM inside each adapter?
So now you're changing your story but SDRAM is a start. How are you going to power the SDRAM? Are you going to use a SDRAM module or discrete chips? What is going to interface the SDRAM to the console? So will each adapter have it's own SDRAM or will it be inside some central device?
You didn't answer my question about what the MBC/MMC chips going to be emulated by. FPGA?
Since you'll obviously need FPGA for many consoles,how will you level shift FPGA I/O to work with TTL consoles?
How are you going to do AES with 5 asynchronous buses?
So this device is of yours has console-specific adapters, loaders and SDRAM, NAND memory. So is it computer dependent or not?
Folks, once you start shouting SDRAM, you better be able to have a rather capable FPGA just to handle dram management.
http://wiki.xtronics.com/index.php/How_Memory_Works
There are some open-source sdram controller cores out there, but have fun finding one that will actually work for your setup.
It is possible to sample 16Mbit SRAM chips from Cypress, I have a couple and they're essentially identical to a generic tsop48 flash ROM except for a slight different command set. But they're something like $40 a chip.
As calpis said, it seems you're opening a whole new can of worms. The AES has a flat insane number of I/O, you'd need a pretty large fpga to run all that.
You're not the first one to think about this stuff. You're right that it's "as simple as" letting it read and write the memory it needs to, but doing that is alot harder than you might think with the way you want to do it. And there are lots of existing devices that do similar things.
I'd love to see SNES, Genesis, and N64 cartridges with CompactFlash memory card slots to load ROMs into internal DRAM and then let you play whatever you wish. NES has the PowerPAK ( retrousb.com ) which is awesome. Costly though at 135$. And no doubt it wasn't simple to design.
If you want something "simple" you can do, you could have PCBs made that allow you to easily install EPROM/FlashROM sockets and such. Or just easily install EPROMs onto a fresh board.
I'm sure everyone would be interested though if you managed to make a working cartridge that loads from flash memory.
does that cover it, calpis?
and the loader is inside each adapter, correct
thought I mentioned before that I planned on not doing it for AES cards because it's too big of a challenge?
anyway, I know how to control SDRAM, I've used it in 2 projects before, thanks for the concern though (LCD controller of the PSP and a homebrew logic analyzer that I gave up on because I couldn't trigger correctly)
big enough fpga? I've a Actel ProAsic 3 250k gates with about 3.5kB ram, PLL and all the other yada yada fancy stuff
not meaning to sound like a dick, but I think *some* people are just posting to pick on me a bit... I'm not here to prove myself because I really don't have to... I really just wanted to know if it was worth it to start this project after finishing this "USB sandbox" I'm working on right now...
excuse my english, it's not my maiden language
Last edited by pit; 12-05-2007 at 10:05 PM.
No one is trying to pick on you. If anything people just want to see if you know what you are doing because alot of people will have ideas like this but no clue what they are doing.
But I'm sure any product like this will have interest.
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