Re: Components Bin, Power Supply, & General Electronics

From: Extrarius (filtered_at_psychosanity.com)
Date: 09/10/04 

Date: 9 Sep 2004 19:34:23 -0700

larwe@larwe.com (Lewin A.R.W. Edwards) wrote in message news:<608b6569.0409070701.6d404964@posting.google.com>...
> > I want to do many random projects, but I'd like to work toward making
> > an NES-level game by both assembling the hardware and programming the
>
> Interesting idea. Most of the difficult work in this will be
> generating the tiles and sprites, and collision detection. This would
> be considerably easier to implement in programmable logic (FPGA) than
> on a PIC, IMHO. And on the PIC you have irritating memory addressing
> limits. I'd suggest you start with something substantially less
> ambitious than a NES-alike, though. Maybe a Pong-alike (which has been
> done in a PIC, BTW). Later, work your way up to emulating those
> multi-game ASICs AY-3-8500 and AY-3-8610A (search google to see what I
> mean). I'm told these chips were really masked, customized PICs anyway
> (though I don't 100% believe it).

Hrmm, I had an interesting idea. From what has been said here and
various sites I've found, it seems the hardest part is generating the
various analog signals(color video seems to be the most difficult, but
also audio) with proper timing on a PIC.

So what about using a small FPGA to make a 'video/audio card' type
device that can take instructions from the PIC and load the tile
images/etc from external memory(probably EEPROM) when needed. With
about 52us per scan line, I'd need ~160ns or faster access time on the
memory to get the desired 320*200 resolution, which seems to be
available in quantity. It seems to me that the only question would be
getting the data from the 'slow' PIC to the 'fast' FPGA.

Of course, I have no idea how difficult that would be, but it seems to
mirror the way things are currently done on computers where there is
are seperate devices for specialized tasks like video and audio
output.

It seems like that would possibly be a lot easier than making the
whole thing on a FPGA (for me, since I don't know hardware design but
I do know normal programming).

Also, what do you mean collision detection would be difficult? I guess
it would be if I wanted per-pixel collisions or something, but that
isn't neccessary for the kinds of things I have in mind. Would the
slow speed of a PIC make even simple bounding box checks too slow?
I've been looking around and considering switching to the SX chips
offered by Parallax/Ubicom, since they can run up to 75Mips as opposed
to the mere 10Mips of the fastest PIC chips, but the high end PIC
chips have much more flash/ram/eeprom onboard that might make managing
things easier.

Or maybe I'm just way off base because I'm completely new to this
field =-)

Relevant Pages

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