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I'm ordering the parts for this today, gonna build one ASAP. :) That's great! Provided you can assure me you have the right tools and experience for soldering the 0.5mm-pitch FPGA, I'd be willing to sell you some blank PCBs at cost. The PCB runs were USD 75.60 for ten FPGA boards and USD 36.75 for ...

Charles MacDonald wrote:Ah, I didn't know there were other console flash carts that were fully open source to the extent that yours was.

Ah sorry I meant the open-source hardware movement in general is gathering momentum, not specifically the hardware related to console-hacking.

Unfortunately getting PCBs made is the easy bit - soldering the chips on is less easy. I'm no electronic engineer so I don't know how to design PCBs for manufacture, so I just design them to be easily hand-solderable. But when I say "easily" it is of course all relative. It's easy for me, but time-c...

Thanks Charles. But is it really all that unprecedented? The open-source hardware movement is gathering momentum, and I can't help but think/hope that the days of "look at this cool thing I made but you can't have it cos it's mine all mine my precious etc etc" are coming to an end.

Thanks, MoD! Yeah I thought the trace-log would be of interest to emulator-writers such as yourself. Let me know if you need me to test stuff for you (for measuring timing, DMA scheduling, etc).

BTW, the project featured on Hackaday today.

Hackaday mention SGDK in their write-up about my UMDK dev-cart (because the UMDK menu program was developed using SGDK).

What is it? The USB MegaDrive DevKit is a project I started several years ago aiming to build a 100% open-source hardware/software development cartridge that aims to make it easy to write and debug homebrew code on a real MegaDrive, as cheaply as possible. And now it's pretty much "finished". http:...

Hi Kaneda,

The UMDKv2 software itself will run nicely on Linux, Windows and MacOSX, but it requires a build of GDB with some modifications so that the disassembly appears in a sane format - that may be tricky to build on Windows but once I've got it working OK on Linux I'll give it a try.

Chris

There's a lot of focus on money here, so I just want to make it absolutely clear that at least for me, money is irrelevant. Everything that is UMDKv2 is freely available on one or another copyleft licence: the schematics, the PCB layout, the VHDL, the firmware, the host-side software, everything. An...

Sorry for late reply, hope it's not too late to be of some help. You can use "flcli" from FPGALink: http://www.makestuff.eu/wordpress/?page_id=1400 ...with a Minimus board (I paid £2.70 or so for mine, but that was a bulk order): http://www.makestuff.eu/wordpress/?p=1927 ...which will download AVR c...

Do you know how much shorter the DMA cycles are? In other words, what's the minimum length of C_OE asserts and the minimum spacing between asserts? And how is the 68000 held off during DMA? And are the address lines still guaranteed valid at the falling edge of C_OE as they are with the 68000?

I kinda lost enthusiasm for my USB Megadrive DevKit because so few people are interested in such things these days. But the other day several people found it and were really enthusiastic about it so yesterday I dusted off the hardware, got the software from GitHub and got it running again, with a vi...

Thanks! Actually I was surprised too. The GDB remote protocol is very simple, and you can get away with only implementing a small subset of the protocol. In my case I implement the protocol on the PC side, and have it forward requests over a custom USB protocol to trigger actions either in the FPGA ...

As promised:

Quick tour of the USB MegaDrive DevKit

I don't know, I don't have a 32X to try it on. I don't remember the exact cycle-counts of the memory controller, and I'd rather not spend time messing with it now because I'll need to revisit it anyway when I move everything off the Nexys2 board (on which it is currently based) onto my own PCB which...