Re: Atari VCS 2600 FPGA Cartridge

On Sun, 19 Apr 2009 22:33:00 +0200, Frank Buss <fb@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Darcio Prestes wrote:

Hey programmable logic seniors! I'm planning to build an Atari VCS
2600 game cartridge in order to play with my "brand new" console
acquired from ebay. I would like to replace the old fashioned 27C
series EPROM by a programmable device thus cutting board space and
(main reason) merging the bankswitching logic and rom file in a single
device. My requirements are 32k x 8 (64k is a plus) of non volatile
memory and some space to house a couple of FFs and logic gates (simple
equations). My question is: which manufacturer, family and/or device
should I look for? Thanks for sharing your valuable experience with my
hobby project.

Wikipedia says that the VCS 2600 has a 6507 with 1.19 MHz. So if the bus is
not faster, the easiest solution would be just a microcontroller with
sufficient flash storage, like the STM32 series or the LPC21xx series.
Should be fast enough in a small assembler loop to decode an address
requests, read the flash location and change the data pins to output.

With ARM MCUs with fast IO like the NXP LPC series, you can use FIQs on the chip select to give very
fast response to external signals - I've read data from an image sensor at 4MHz like this in the
past.
The only problem is that to get enough on-chip RAM you end up paying for a lot of flash you don't
need - and external SRAM usually works out cheaper.

However a CPLD plus SRAM may end up being the cheapest overall solution.

.

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