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FPGA Based Videogame System


kevtris

Interest in an FPGA Videogame System  

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  1. 1. I would pay....

  2. 2. I Would Like Support for...

  3. 3. Games Should Run From...

    • SD Card / USB Memory Sticks
    • Original Cartridges
    • Hopes and Dreams
  4. 4. The Video Inteface Should be...


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Just curious... since the FPGA simulates the actual chips why do certain games need to have patches or certain extensions to work on the NT Mini? Or some homebrew, etc.. do not work on the NT Mini but are fine on the original hardware?

 

The original hardware of course works without any special change. Not a criticism at all - just would like to understand. Thanks!

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Just curious... since the FPGA simulates the actual chips why do certain games need to have patches or certain extensions to work on the NT Mini? Or some homebrew, etc.. do not work on the NT Mini but are fine on the original hardware?

 

The original hardware of course works without any special change. Not a criticism at all - just would like to understand. Thanks!

nothing should need a patch. Extensions are required because the hardware is not a soothsayer. It's impossible (or very difficult) to determine mapper type if there's nothing unique about the ROM like a header or file size. Some systems like 2600 are terrible in that there's zero in the way of mapper ID. No headers, no nothin'. It miight be possible to do heuristics on the ROM to see if it writes anywhere special but this is really difficult if you don't have a computer worth of resources. A lot of emulators use CRCs or other hashes of the files which I personally don't like, since if you change 1 byte, hack, or make new ROMs, they will not run at all.

 

The file extension method seemed to be the best way to handle this. It isn't a great method, but it's the best one I could come up with, since keeping a database would be difficult to do (this isn't a computer and I don't have a lot of RAM). I could hash/check, but again this limits you to running existing stuff and nothing new without an update. The Retron 5 suffers from this problem. It won't run homebrews because of it.

 

Homebrews would work, but you need to specify mapper (if needed). Think I mentioned it earlier, someone tried to run a homebrew and asked me to help. So I checked it out and the homebrew had NO mapper information listed for it! I am not sure how you're supposed to run it on emulators. Maybe Stella just knows the mapper by osmosis, not sure. The homebrew was this:

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/217009-zippy-the-porcupine-4-level-demo/

 

I read through the thread, but nowhere does it mention what mapper it uses. If you know what mapper it uses, it should work just fine. Fortunately on other systems, this isn't such a problem. There are several mappers now on NES that I do not support, but this is due to lack of information and lack of ROMs. Homebrew games like this generally do not get a ROM release, so that makes it difficult to test them or make a mapper for it.

 

So I guess it basically all comes down to a lack of info in the file itself (i.e. which mapper to use) or lack of info on how the mapper works (if known), or lack of test data (ROMs) that use it. If you plug a game into a cart adapter, it would just work theoretically without any intervention from the user. Since it's being presented in "native" format it should work fine.

 

Not really a whine or bitch session (well maybe a little, hehe) but getting everything to run is very difficult due to the wide variety of things out there, including stuff I personally have not seen.

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nothing should need a patch.

....

... well nothing well known, but sometimes there's no option.

 

Take for example the NeoGeo I believe up until one month ago or so one of the Metal Slug (Metal Slug X to be precise) needed patching to bypass the protection as it was not understood how it worked (MAME did that too) .... now it's been identified and finally (on the NeoSD only afaik) you can play the unadulterated ROM, which for purists is paramount (I am not sure I personally would be able to tell any difference).

 

That's an extreme case but there are others, like the S-DD1 for SNES. There are only 2 games for it, and one (Star Ocean) has been patched to not need the chip at all .... given the chip was merely a decompressor for Star Ocean a patched version with the assets already decompressed is circulating and it sidesteps then the issue of having to recreate the S-DD1 for that game at least (at present there's no known FPGA core for S-DD1 although it seems everything that needs to be known for it is known).

 

There may be other cases where patches are required, like playing one of those pesky SMS games on a Genny with a Genny controller (not sure it has the same issues on a US SMS with a Genny controller) ... as it simply doesn't work .... or the patches to allow CV games requiring the steering wheel to be played with the normal controller, the list goes on (Mission ImPossible patch for 7800 US) .....

 

So there are reasons to patch that do not necessarily deal with just making the game work on a broken or subpar core/emulator (although that too happens, look what's going on for the Atari FB portable).

 

But if I get your drift you don't expect any of your cores to require patching just for the sake to have the game work (aside the controller fixups when one wants it [CV wheel -> CV pad for example] or gfx packs like 7800 Double Dragon/Rampage/Mission Impossible)

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I'm having some trouble with the Channel F...

Some Roms won't load at all and others once they've loaded I can't change to another rom without loading another core then loading the Channel F one again.

I've tried two different Bios files with the same results...

 

Do I have a bad rom set or bad bios?

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I'm having some trouble with the Channel F...

Some Roms won't load at all and others once they've loaded I can't change to another rom without loading another core then loading the Channel F one again.

I've tried two different Bios files with the same results...

 

Do I have a bad rom set or bad bios?

That's weird. What exactly is it doing? I have heard of this happening and it ended up being the SD card that had issues.

 

Kevtris

 

Thanks for all the work.

 

Do you know of any problems with certain monitors not playing some audio and or no audio through the HDMI output? Any ideas for a fix if any?

I heard 1 or 2 reports of the audio not working on some monitors, like certain asus models. The DC offset fix I did should fix this. As a bonus, it fixed the popping sound when starting a new NSF in the NSF player. So the latest update should fix this. Be sure to delete the /system/ directory on your SD card and put the new one from the zip file in there if you have this issue.

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Kevtris, first off thanks for all the great work, really enjoying playing all these old consoles on the Mini. I am currently having an issue that I was hoping either yourself or someone on the forum could help with. When I load either of the SMS, GG or Colecovision cores while using RGB on my BVM via the Retro Gaming Cables scart, I am getting the output below. I actually also had this had this happen on my original SMS as well. It would work over RF, but if using RGB via scart (which I purchased from Retro Console Accessories on eBay) I would get the same thing. I had contacted her about it but she didn't have any ideas and I just figured there was perhaps an issue with my system. However, now that this is also happening on the Mini I assume it's an issue with the way the cables are wired. Was wondering if anyone else was having this issue or had any ideas on what may be causing it? I won't be able to fashion a cable myself, but perhaps I can have either of the two mentioned above create something for me. I should also note that I don't have these issues over Composite or HDMI.

 

I also had an issue with Mega Man Xtreme on the GBC core. During the intro for instance, the image of Mega Man will be correct for a split second, and then all the colors in his face are gone. Also when you get into the game, if you bring up your menu and then go back to gameplay, all of the background information is lost and you only see your character. I'm using the Smokemonster roms, but maybe I'll try downloading another set to test.

 

Also, I saw in previous comments a lot of people were having issues finding roms and BIOS for Gamate and Game King. I too cannot seem to find these (was able to track down a Gamate BIOS but that's it), so if anyone here would be willing to help with that it would be greatly appreciated and you could PM me directly if you'd like.

 

Thanks again for everything Kevtris. Looking forward to the next firmware so I can use this Famicom Network controller I bought :)

 

Unrelated: I too had an issue with the power supply being really noisy. Even just having it plugged into the wall it was making noise. Analogue provided a replacement power supply (of another make) that works fine, so I'm not sure why they weren't helpful with some other posters here. Might wanna go back to them and tell them to fix their own damn problem!

 

azf1g3.jpg

 

May I ask what BVM you're using? Is it a BVM-A24E1WU using the BKM-68X RGB input board?

 

If it's a BVM-D24E1WU, then you should be able to remove that skew with the image by enabling the "VCR MODE" in the "EXTEND MENU" section of the BVM menu.

Edited by xga
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I had some questions about the Genesis core (even if it doesn't come out until the Z3k). Will it be using the HD graphics Tmss free version? The HD graphics version has better audio output and doesn't have the annoying startup license screen.
If you require one for testing I would be happy to send you mine.


Also for the snes core on the z3k have you decided which snes model to use? I'm told the 1 chip models have a much clearer picture but some people complain it has graphical glitches with some games (Heard that from Retrorgb but I don't know about it first hand). I hear the mini has a picture on par or better than the 1 chip models but I'm not sure if that also gets the glitches or not.

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I had some questions about the Genesis core (even if it doesn't come out until the Z3k). Will it be using the HD graphics Tmss free version? The HD graphics version has better audio output and doesn't have the annoying startup license screen.

If you require one for testing I would be happy to send you mine.

 

 

Also for the snes core on the z3k have you decided which snes model to use? I'm told the 1 chip models have a much clearer picture but some people complain it has graphical glitches with some games (Heard that from Retrorgb but I don't know about it first hand). I hear the mini has a picture on par or better than the 1 chip models but I'm not sure if that also gets the glitches or not.

Since I am recreating the hardware, I can make it do anything. I most likely will do what I did with the game gear- you can either select no bios (straight startup) or a bios (it shows the screen).

 

The SNES will output high quality RGB using the DAC I am using now, which is excellent. It is much higher quality than the one on the SNES. I will probably target one of the multi chip versions, since it won't have those glitches. But I can tweak the hardware slightly if needed to fix them.

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Since I am recreating the hardware, I can make it do anything. I most likely will do what I did with the game gear- you can either select no bios (straight startup) or a bios (it shows the screen).

 

The SNES will output high quality RGB using the DAC I am using now, which is excellent. It is much higher quality than the one on the SNES. I will probably target one of the multi chip versions, since it won't have those glitches. But I can tweak the hardware slightly if needed to fix them.

Awesome! I was thinking some people might have nostalgia for the tmss screen for some bizarre reason and was hoping it would at least be optional.

 

And that's exactly what I was hoping for from the snes. Crystal clear picture and no glitches. I was afraid you would only want pure accuracy which would have been a tricky choice between blur or glitches.

 

Anyways both of those were good calls so icon_thumbsup.gif

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That's weird. What exactly is it doing? I have heard of this happening and it ended up being the SD card that had issues.

 

I heard 1 or 2 reports of the audio not working on some monitors, like certain asus models. The DC offset fix I did should fix this. As a bonus, it fixed the popping sound when starting a new NSF in the NSF player. So the latest update should fix this. Be sure to delete the /system/ directory on your SD card and put the new one from the zip file in there if you have this issue.

I'm the one on nesdev that messaged you about the audio bug with the asus monitor on the hi-def kit, now with the nt mini before this recent update it worked pretty good only taking a few secs for the audio kick in on some games. but after this latest update I can confirm that it completely fixed it.

Edited by Thomas83Lin
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I know it's not addressed in your update, but I'm still having serious issues with my FDS not loading disks/freezing during gameplay.

 

I tested my FDS RAM adaptor a bit more, and even ran the test feature with it (hold start & select on power-up) and VRAM, SRAM tests seem fine. There seems to be no graphical corruption for a correctly-inserted RAM adaptor, and the BIOS menu runs properly. So, the cartridge part of the FDS appears to be fine. What fails is most/any kind of loading from the drive. Do you have bad IRQ handling or something, Kevin?

 

Also, more bug reports: the FM chip on the SMS has buggy per-channel sustain emulation. I tested it out with my own FM ROM tool and the "sustain" option for each channel appears to have no effect, contrary to what the real hardware does.

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I tested my FDS RAM adaptor a bit more, and even ran the test feature with it (hold start & select on power-up) and VRAM, SRAM tests seem fine. There seems to be no graphical corruption for a correctly-inserted RAM adaptor, and the BIOS menu runs properly. So, the cartridge part of the FDS appears to be fine. What fails is most/any kind of loading from the drive. Do you have bad IRQ handling or something, Kevin?

 

Do you have the older version or the newer version of the FDS RAM Adapter? https://tcrf.net/Family_Computer_Disk_System

 

Also, the older revisions of the RAM adapter's PCB use DRAM while the newer revisions use SRAM. http://green.ap.teacup.com/applet/junker/msgcate21/archive

 

May that have an effect on whether the loading is successful or not?

 

I would be happy to let kevtris borrow my FDSStick to help explore these issues. Of course at $15 shipped he may just want to buy his own.

Edited by Great Hierophant
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I know this is kinda getting deep into the weeds, but I really like this device as a potential for capturing truly perfect video output from real hardware, and I've noticed some artifacts that shouldn't be there. Refer to this gallery or the attached image:

 

http://imgur.com/a/5zoAb

 

Whenever two pixels of the same color are diagonal from each other, these artifacts are created. It's *possible* that my capture equipment is to blame (USB3HDCAP), but as far as I know this is a lossless capture of the video being piped to it.

 

Video is set to 4x height and 4x width, to eliminate any odd scaling being the culprit. Latest FW too.

post-1819-0-52062500-1489948363_thumb.png

Edited by TheRedEye
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I tested my FDS RAM adaptor a bit more, and even ran the test feature with it (hold start & select on power-up) and VRAM, SRAM tests seem fine. There seems to be no graphical corruption for a correctly-inserted RAM adaptor, and the BIOS menu runs properly. So, the cartridge part of the FDS appears to be fine. What fails is most/any kind of loading from the drive. Do you have bad IRQ handling or something, Kevin?

 

Also, more bug reports: the FM chip on the SMS has buggy per-channel sustain emulation. I tested it out with my own FM ROM tool and the "sustain" option for each channel appears to have no effect, contrary to what the real hardware does.

Hmm, IRQ should be fine. I am still mystified as to these FDS issues, since I tried 3 different FDS units (RAM pack + drive) here on 20 different units. I have some FDS units with the 4 DRAM chips, and some with a single 32 pin DRAM (it's not SRAM, but a weird 32K*8 DRAM). It could still be a timing issue; slowing the NES down very slightly requires stealing cycles, which I do at the same place on each CPU cycle. This was causing the FDS to crash depending on where in the cycle I did it. It looks like the DRAM state machine gets confused and outputs FF's instead of the proper data.

 

To test this, run it in RGB mode and see if FDS still crashes. I don't have a crashing FDS, so it makes it impossible for me to test this. I think the FDS stick might be partially to blame if it has some kind of timing problem, so it latches bad data or something. Again, without any way to repro I am stuck. Running in RGB mode will fix timing to "exact" original NES btw.

 

re: FM chip, yes I knew about this and haven't had much luck fixing it actually. I checked my code and it is in there but for some reason it isn't working and I dunno why. That's why it's still not listed as 100%. I need a good "go/no go" test for this, or some way to repro it so I can test it. I was having a lot of problems trying to test this. Spent about 8 hours on that before I released the SMS core but had no luck finding a good way to test/repro to know for sure if I fixed it.

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I know this is kinda getting deep into the weeds, but I really like this device as a potential for capturing truly perfect video output from real hardware, and I've noticed some artifacts that shouldn't be there. Refer to this gallery or the attached image:

 

http://imgur.com/a/5zoAb

 

Whenever two pixels of the same color are diagonal from each other, these artifacts are created. It's *possible* that my capture equipment is to blame (USB3HDCAP), but as far as I know this is a lossless capture of the video being piped to it.

 

Video is set to 4x height and 4x width, to eliminate any odd scaling being the culprit. Latest FW too.

Checking it out here, setting to 5x and max width, I don't see it at all. It's possible it's there and I just can't see it though. I stretched it way out to make those rogue areas bigger and still can't see anything. I need moar infoz.

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Any chance we will get pokey sound with the 7800?

Umm it's in there :-) Make sure your ROM has the proper bit set in the header to turn it on. The Ballblazer ROM I found was correct, while Commando wasn't. There's instructions in the text file that lives in the /7800/ dir that explains how to fix Commando (and a few other games).

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That's weird. What exactly is it doing? I have heard of this happening and it ended up being the SD card that had issues.

 

I heard 1 or 2 reports of the audio not working on some monitors, like certain asus models. The DC offset fix I did should fix this. As a bonus, it fixed the popping sound when starting a new NSF in the NSF player. So the latest update should fix this. Be sure to delete the /system/ directory on your SD card and put the new one from the zip file in there if you have this issue.

 

I used a HDMI to VGA adaptor for testing, it did not work with the Nt Mini. It worked with Hi-Def NES, dont know if your fix will make any difference here?

 

Direct connection with HDMI have worked great with the Mini. Just wanted to mention cause I figure those are quite similar in a HDMI point of view..

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I have finished up a big update to the firmware today! There's a lot of little fixes and changes. Here's a list:

 

[...]

* Added ability to change highlight text colour in the menus. I cannot add it to NES composite s/vid due to space (but it works on other cores).

 

[...]

 

There's a new menu entry in the video menu to set the highlight colour now to 1 of 7 different values if you so choose. It defaults to green.

Do you think that you could gray out/"remove" options which do not work for certain outputs (mostly analog, I suppose) like cropping or this text highlight when using these output methods? So that people wouldn't wonder, for instance, why the cropping slider does nothing, and just to keep the menu clean.

 

Since I am recreating the hardware, I can make it do anything. I most likely will do what I did with the game gear- you can either select no bios (straight startup) or a bios (it shows the screen).

 

The SNES will output high quality RGB using the DAC I am using now, which is excellent. It is much higher quality than the one on the SNES. I will probably target one of the multi chip versions, since it won't have those glitches. But I can tweak the hardware slightly if needed to fix them.

Yeah, I guess going for the cleanest RBG and HDMI outputs is the right decision. And wherever possible recreating composite outputs for the ultimate nostalgia factor.

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Do you have the older version or the newer version of the FDS RAM Adapter? https://tcrf.net/Family_Computer_Disk_System

 

Also, the older revisions of the RAM adapter's PCB use DRAM while the newer revisions use SRAM. http://green.ap.teacup.com/applet/junker/msgcate21/archive

 

May that have an effect on whether the loading is successful or not?

 

I would be happy to let kevtris borrow my FDSStick to help explore these issues. Of course at $15 shipped he may just want to buy his own.

Oddly, after doing the test (and trying-and failing miserably-multiple times to bring up the programmer credit), I was able to play upwards of half an hour without incident before stopping.

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Checking it out here, setting to 5x and max width, I don't see it at all. It's possible it's there and I just can't see it though. I stretched it way out to make those rogue areas bigger and still can't see anything. I need moar infoz.

 

Here, I've got a 100% repro process that should probably give you some clues as to what's happening, the problem goes away entirely when bringing the menu up on screen.

 

1. Load Super Mario Bros., press start on title screen, leave Mario in his starting position

2. Size to 4x horizontal and 4x vertical

3. Observe Mario. He looks perfect.

4. Exit menu.

5. Observe Mario. He has the "teardrop" effect on his face.

6. Press hotkey to bring menu back up.

7. Observe Mario. His face is perfect.

 

I've taken screenshots of his face in both states 8 separate times, the results are the same every time. Images attached.

 

Explanation of attached images:

 

mariotest01.png - 4x horizontal and 4x vertical with the menu open. Note that Mario looks perfect, as if from an emulator screenshot.

mariotest02.png - 4x horizontal and 4x vertical with menu closed. Note the "teardrop effect" on Mario.

 

Bonus:

 

mario5x.png - this is the same game with 5x horizontal and 5x vertical. Totally separate issue obviously, but there is some "ringing" around Mario with 5x horizontal.

post-1819-0-95762500-1489960472_thumb.png

post-1819-0-05335300-1489960480_thumb.png

post-1819-0-53735900-1489960795_thumb.png

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