Hello all.
I have been developing a board for a while to run the games developed at
www.fpgaarcade.com. I have also been working towards a gate-level perfect AtariST clone (ok, wrong forum
). Having talked to Dennis I decided to include a similar bootloader to Minimig so it can also run the Amiga hardware.
This is how it stands at the moment (its about 90% placed, some components are missing).
The board size is ECX but it has got slightly bigger today and is now "EPIC/ narrow mini-ITX" 17 cm wide by 12 high. It will fit in an ITX case and the two front screws are correct. It is a slightly ~6mm oversize EPIC format.
I wanted to keep the base board as simple as possible, everything platform specific would go on a daughter card. This increases the cost though, so I added some connectors at the top but these would not be fitted. The daughter board can be stuffed with whatever connectors you wish. Two daughter boards are being designed, one has the joystick ports over the bottom connectors and TV out, and the other has a JAMMA edge connector for arcade game cabs.
It has DVI out as well as 30bit analogue RGB on the DVI connector. You can plug in a 15 pin VGA adapter or a cable to your SCART TV. It has a high quality audio output as well.
The PIC has a bootloader so it can be updated by the serial port (if it works!)
The FPGA is quite a bit bigger than the one on Dennis' board (Spartan3E ~ 1.2 M gates), so I am hoping the 68K processor would not need to be fitted and we would use TobiFlex's core. (Hello again!)
The RAM is DDR DRAM and there is 64MB of it, maybe more. I will come up with wrappers for the Minimig code so it runs on this board. What I want to get to is the bootloader loads a default FPGA image at startup which drives the on screen menu. You then choose the platform (Amiga/Atari/Pacman/HD Asteroids etc) and the disk images / roms.
I will do a small production run when it all works as it is tricky to solder BGAs at home
Any comments? There is still time to tweak it....
Should the base card have composite / SVHS TV out, or is the DVI into a HDMI tv good enough? Do modern TVs work at 50Hz with HDMI actually, I don't have one???
Thanks,
Mike.
www.fpgaarcade.com