RE: Rebuilding the PCB for a vector game

G'day Zonn and all,

Originally, my FPGA project was intended to create a cheap drop-in
replacement part for the Cinematronics motherboard. Using a 586 to emulate
the motherboard is also a viable option now that computer prices have been
dropping in the last few years.

In fact, I'd say that using the 586 is a better general solution to my FPGA
since it'll require less maintanence over the years as computer systems
evolve. Now the parallel cards might be hard to fix/replace five years from
now, but that's more of an interface issue.

            Steve Ozdemir
            sozdemir@att.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Zonn [mailto:zonn@zonn.com]
Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2000 2:38 PM
To: vectorlist@lists.cc.utexas.edu
Subject: Re: Rebuilding the PCB for a vector game

On Wed, 5 Jan 2000 12:57:21 -0600 , you wrote:

>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).

Given a 586 PC-clone with the proper number of parallel cards for driving
the
monitor and sound cards, you could run emulation software that would be
indistinguishable from the real hardware.

As long as the parallel outputs are all timed the same as the original
hardware, neither the display nor the sound board would know it's being
driven
by anything other than the original hardware. And neither would the player.

Realize I'm talking about driving a real Cinematronics monitor and sound
card,
this is not a *MAME* type of thing...

This would also allow new games to be written in the native processor (a 586
in this case), allowing for much more processing power. And for the
possibility of running other hardware emulators (Asteroids for example.)

-Zonn
Received on Wed Jan 5 13:46:03 2000