Re: DVG Multigame

> This looks like a subject that could well develop into a religious war,
>so all I'm going to say is: if _you_ like 'em, more power to you, but a PAL
>will _never_ be my first choice for a circuit design. :)

I must confess that I used to have the *exact* same mindset you did until I
got over the initial learning curve on PALs (and programmable logic in
general) and then the more I used them the more useful I found them...

One other little thing that's nice about PALs is that you don't have to have
a huge array of parts in your work-bins and when it comes time to
experiment. (...and if you build multiple projects like I do, you don't need
to stock a bazillion different IC's.)

This is sorta vaguely related, but one of my friends here did what I think
is the hardware hack of the decade. His company made SNES development
systems. Well, he made a low-cost SNES cart that was used for music
authoring and/or graphics development for companies so they wouldn't have to
buy a bunch of (his) $10K ICE systems for writing a soundtrack. Anyway,
there's *one* part in it. It's a 22V10. He figured out how to encode
enough 65816 instructions onto the PAL so that it would actually boot the
SNES and then wait for input from a parallel printer port with the rest of
the code which got shoved into RAM. Once the code was loaded from a PC, the
22V10 turned into a bidirectional printer-port for upload/download of the
music/sound data depending on the product. Very clever design. (I think
they sold it for something like $999 each, which was a steal compared to a
full ICE. A lot of the cost was in the music and graphics editing software
development, but the company still did really well with it...)

-Clay

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Received on Sat Mar 11 22:14:06 2000