custom co-processor chips like the SVP?

For anything related to cart (SRAM, SF2 mapper, audio, CD mode 1, ...)

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letoulousain
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Location: toulouse

Post by letoulousain » Tue Nov 11, 2014 10:52 pm

Chilly Willy wrote:Sgdk doesn't support any of these, but it would be easy enough to make a plain gcc cross-compiler for ARM. You need more than just a chip to make a cart like this... just look at the UMDK cart to get an idea of what it takes to make a cart like we talk about in this thread.

As far as clocking the chip goes, that ARM chip generates a bunch of internal clocks (including the main 125MHz clock), and can be PLL locked to a multiple of an external clock.

It has some internal flash rom you'd want to put some boot code in, but you'd mainly want some external SRAM to hook to it to hold the main code and data. It has an external bus controller that gives you eight banks of up to 16MBytes each for things like rom, ram, and memory mapped IO.

Of course it has all sorts of goodies like timers and dma channels and whatnot. Just download the manual from the Digikey page and read through it.
I will explore this possibility, thank you.
thanks to Stef SGDK

MintyTheCat
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Post by MintyTheCat » Wed Nov 12, 2014 12:34 pm

Let me have a think about it but I am all for putting up a post in the Collaboration section to first of all work out what functionality a custom-cart should provide and then to work out the hardware details.

Ideally, we would be looking at working with those with experience in VHDL/Verilog, Schematic-Capture, etc.

Then to consider the architecture factors - memory-mapped 'registers' works for me for status. Data-Pipes/Slots/etc for request loading.

Then to work on the Firmware.

Then to come up with some MD examples that demonstrate the custom-cart's capabilities.

We also need to be mind of power usage issues; I forget what the MD's PSU can source but we'd have to me mindful of uC/etc frequency and take into account anything we can get 'for free' due to internal PLL frequency-scaling.

Sound ok and have I missed anything?
UMDK Fanboy

MintyTheCat
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Post by MintyTheCat » Wed Nov 12, 2014 12:44 pm

Began a Thread:

viewtopic.php?t=1925
UMDK Fanboy

POLYGAMe
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Re: custom co-processor chips like the SVP?

Post by POLYGAMe » Tue Jan 05, 2016 9:29 am

You know what would be cool? A 32X in a cart. Surely that's possible with today's tech!

prophet36
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Re: custom co-processor chips like the SVP?

Post by prophet36 » Tue Jan 05, 2016 8:23 pm

POLYGAMe wrote:You know what would be cool? A 32X in a cart. Surely that's possible with today's tech!
If you threw out the instruction trace FIFO, you might be able to implement the 32X logic in a UMDK cart. According to Wikipedia the 32X was based on a couple of Hitachi SH2s. There's an open-source implementation of the SH2 core, which apparently fits in the LX9 FPGA used by UMDK. It would be a great project for somebody! :-)

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