RE: Rebuilding the PCB for a vector game

G'day folks,

As I've said before, the closest I've gotten to remanufacturing PCB's is an
attempt to squish the Cinematronics motherboard (composed of solely 7400
series IC's and digital interfaces) into an FPGA with alot of I/O pins. As
you've said below, I might put add a large EPROM and modern RAM to the
design.

With FPGA's, you get the feeling that "software concepts" of registers,
flops and gate arrays are replacing what use to be hardware ICs. My hope
would be that these concepts would still be supported five years from now.
If we replace old hardware with modern hardware, I fear that five years from
now we'd be back to replacing discontinued parts and laying out the board on
new PCBs again (instead of on a schematic capture program).

            Steve Ozdemir
            sozdemir@att.com

ps - To be fair, development on a FPGA has its own set of problems. If
propogation of signals across the FPGA is not fast enough, then you have to
resort to simulation and redesign accordingly. Also, as software packages
are upgraded, you have to repeatedly import your design (and possibly run
simulations again in the worst case). So I guess just like with hardware,
there's a certain amount of maintanence that has to be performed.

-----Original Message-----
From: Joel Rosenzweig [mailto:Joel_Rosenzweig@Agilent.com]
Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2000 1:12 PM
To: vectorlist@lists.cc.utexas.edu
Subject: Rebuilding the PCB for a vector game

I'm curious if anyone has thought of reproducing the PCBs for some of our
favorite vector games. After debugging several catastrophic failures with
my Battlezone over the weekend, all of which were mechanical in nature (bad
sockets, bad cables, oxidized pins...) I started thinking that it would be
great to have a fresh PCB that I could populate with new components. I
figured there were at least two options: Reproduce the board exactly like
the original, and use the original to develop the art for the new version.
Or redo the board using modern memory components to consolidate the RAMs
into some monolithic device, and consolidate the PROMs into one larger
device, which would require a new board layout.

Battlezone and Asteroids do not have a HUGE parts count. It seems that if
the schematic were correct, it could be entered "as-is" into one of the
routing and layout packages and it could develop a nice compact unit,
without even bothering to copy the art from an actual board. Whatever the
plan, it would be nice to have a brand new PCB. It just seems that in order
to preserve these games for years to come, we might need some new boards to
put components into.

I haven't calculated price for a double layer board of Asteroids size, but I
expect that in quantity, the price could be made reasonable. I'm sure the
quantity one price is much more than the price of several working logic
boards. :-)

Any thoughts? Interest? Anyone already doing this?

Joel-
Received on Wed Jan 5 12:58:07 2000