kevtris, on 19 Sept 2015 - 4:16 PM, said:
Well, After seeing their IGG page, and how the FPGA is gone? or significantly reduced from their system, I can't stay silent any longer. As many know, there was talk of various "cores" on the RVGS, and that I was going to be the dork supplying them. Anyways, I thought I would inject a little bit of sanity into the whole "FPGA videogame system" realm and show off what I have been able to do alone, and without any kind of outside funding.
I started working on FPGA videogame cores and systems back in 2004, when I made my first prototype "FPGA videogame" board. Back then, I was enamored with DB9 controllers (genesis, 2600, etc). So as can be seen in this prototype, I have two DB9 ports, a DB15 (for NES/SNES controller adapters, and "expansion"), an SD card and several other things. Namely VGA, composite, s-video, audio, PS/2 keyboard and mouse (lol). This system worked, and is what I developed the FPGA NES and FPGA 2600 on.
Then in 2010, I decided to update my project and designed and built a second prototype system. Since plastic enclosure design was expensive, I made it fit inside an NES cartridge shell, and the connectors would stick out the back, where the cartridge would otherwise normally fit into the NES system. This prototype was used to design the rest of my systems (17 to date).
(bonus image of that board outputting DVI to a flatpanel, running Kirby's Adventure)
With this board, I finished up A LOT of systems. All of these systems are DONE and 100% finished and tested, ready to be targeted ("ported") to nearly anything with an FPGA inside it:
* NES
* SMS
* Game Gear
* Colecovision
* Atari 2600
* Atari 7800
* Gameboy
* Gameboy Colour (has 1 or 2 tiny bugs left, but 99.9% of the games run)
* Intellivision (with Intellivoice, computer add-on, etc)
* Odyssey^2 (with The Voice add-on)
* Creativision (with tape drive support)
* Arcadia 2001
* Adventure Vision
* Videobrain
* RCA Studio 2 (lul)
* Fairchild Channel F
* Supervision (crappyish LCD handheld)
and some non-game things like an SNES SPC music player with visualizer, and a realtime mandelbrot zoomer/explorer.
Again, all the above are done and ready to go and currently work on my homemade dev board.
Then in 2014, I decided to make my third FPGA Videogame board.. the "possibly sellable" version. This board was a huge step up from the last, and is on par with what the RVGS has and can do IMO. The interesting part is this board exists and I have designed it and wrote code for it. Amusingly I have not actually stuffed one of the boards, but I will explain why later. The board was manufactured, and I did buy all the parts however.
First, here's my "3D render" of the board, fresh out of Altium (circuit board program).
The goals for this board were these:
* Make something I can sell!
* Include ALL the outputs possible for video and audio, but only it people paid extra to keep costs down if you were only interested in HDMI
* 4 USB controller ports
* High speed SD card interface (4 bit mode, 50MHz)
* menu buttons for the user so he does not need to dork with the controller
* RGB status LED
* Expansion port for cartridge adapters (the right side connector)
* Be able to run all the current cores + SNES, Genesis, Neogeo, and possibly PS1 era systems.
* 1080p/60fps video output
* Ethernet port
The board is 6 layers, and was my first board in Altium after I switched over in 2014. It was a lot of fun to design and it helped me to learn Altium. I got the boards made which cost around $600 (for 10 of them), and bought parts (another 400-500 bucks). There's no less than TWO Cyclone V FPGAs on here- Itchy is designed to be the "user interface" and video scaler/processor, and Scratchy is the "engine" that does all the core running and nothing else.
Before I had a chance to stuff the boards, I worked on that HiDefNES NES to HDMI adapter which was finished a month or so ago and released. I am glad I did, because I learned a lot of stuff about HDMI and can now revise my board to save a lot of parts and cost that I don't need. So, there will be another cheaper rev of this board now. I already have the parts, so I just need to design a newer PCB.
Here's two views of the finished boards. I bought the main 6 layer board and some of the 4 layer "analog" boards, and plugged them together for these pictures:
And if you're REALLY curious what my board stackup looks like, including internal layers you can see that here:
http://gerblook.org/pcb/JTtikCWit4ezouDz9p37Fn#top-copper
Click the links at the left to view the different layers.
I noticed in the IGG that they are allocating around $100K(!) for prototype development. This is an insane amount of money, considering I am in for around $1000-1200 on my latest "advanced" prototypes- around 1% of what they are seeking. No, I am not going to start asking for money, just thought it was interesting to point out. Total development time from concept to prototype PCBs+parts was around 2-3 months. This included the design time in Altium, learning Altium, and getting the boards manufactured.
I figured if I was going to sell this thing, I was damn well going to have a working prototype of what I wanted to manufacture, and have the software fully working too.
As for the cartridge adapters, I came up with this idea almost 2 years ago, and the evidence can be seen on my above prototype PCB. I anticipated selling adapters in "groups". i.e. a single adapter might contain 3 or 4 cartridge ports each. The main stopper of course is packaging them into some kind of enclosure (requiring expensive molding, but today it isn't TOO bad). Frankly the electronics on something like this isn't too hairy, it always comes down to how you are going to package it, and who's going to want to pay for it. hehe.
Just thought I'd drop the bomb in here about how I have basically created what they are trying to create, but actually have gotten it manufactured and did it all on a shoestringish budget.
(If anyone thinks this doodad would fly with a $200-250 price point, lemme know. The only reason I have not tried to sell it was because I thought it was too much money to get a lot of support on i.e. Kickstarter)
If you want to know more info about anything lemme know. There's also video of each system running on my youtube channel "kevtris".
