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This is incredible! Thank you for posting and outlining all your work! As a fellow 80s/90s kid, this is extremely my shit.
So thank you again b/c this is legit inspiring and exciting!
This is a wonderful project. Well done. You might just inspire this software engineer to take his first crack at hardware. :) One somewhat personal question, if you don't mind. You say you are Portuguese. Is English a second language for you? I don't see the telltale signs of a Portuguese -> English speaker (I have a lot of experience interacting with Portuguese speakers, and their English mistakes are pretty uniform…
It's almost like Portuguese people are not a uniform block, right?
If you're interested in this you might be interested in 8-bit Guy's new computer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayh0qebfD2g
Oh to built 20Mhz systems again! ... no picosecond timing skews to stress over, no ground plane worries, no trace-related design rule violations, no harmonic noise issues, no dynamic bus inversions to prevent victim/attacker degradation, no thermal issues... I spend so much time debugging GHz multi-layer circuit boards that I forget how "easy" 20MHz digital circuits can be. This guy's project is truly inspiring!
I would love to learn more and be able to work with faster circuits like you. Yes it's way easier to work with "slow" digital circuits I had very little issues using breadboards and really long wires, that probably look cringy to you and others.
Wow. This is incredible. Bookmarked and will be a lot interested if you could do a series of blog post, man. This is amazing.
I'm gonna try and keep posting.
Okay, this is cool as hell. I've reading up about the architectures and programming of computers and consoles from the 80s and early 90s lately, and have been itching to do a similar project of my own, but have been kind of floundering on where to get started. The fact that you pulled this off inspires that this sorta thing can be done. Have you considered doing a series of blog posts going into more detail on each s…
I am considering doing a series of blog posts, I don't know how often I could write them or if I could keep them going, but I will try. I'm not big in social media and I have never written any posts or anything like before this one, which is weird, I'll admit it, so all this is kind of new, but I think I'll give it go.
Old systems used line-buffers like the Neo Geo or no buffers like the NES, for example. So yeah, going with a frame-buffered approach was definitely easier, but this was not the only reason I chose this way. I had a lot of restrictions, I was learning a lot of stuff, I didn't know how to work with FPGAs and I stuck with DIP package ICs that I could put on breadboards and experiment. And that's why I picked the AVR microcontrollers, which are awesome but have their disavantages. They have good performance (20Mhz), but not many pins and I had to bit-bang things like external RAM access (actually the PPU accesses 3 RAMs with only 32 IO pins available), which meant that it takes "some time" to access external memory. That's why I chose 2 microcontrollers for video instead of just one, one of them could take "all the time in the world" (one frame) to fetch information and write a frame to the frame buffer while the other would generate the video signal and dump the a frame to the TV. Connecting the two, I felt a double buffer was better.
I definitely would have preferred doing a more "traditional" non-buffered render system, but this was the solution I found with what I had to work with.
I hope serves as a good explanation and maybe I'll get to explain these details better in another post :).
I built a 68k machine (no video, just CPU, Serial I/O, RAM/ROM) in high school and it was really nostalgic to see your incredible and awesome project!
Congrats on such an awesome build!!!