Jump to content
Have You Played Atari Today?
2600|5200|7800|Lynx|Jaguar|Forums|Store  

Enigma

Banned
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content Count

    9

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Enigma

  1. Posted

     

    Fail is a strong word. ;)

    I had a board working well about 4-5 years ago (with no cartridge slot). I converted it to an SG-1000 (without controller support, though), because that was something I was interested in at the time.

    A year later, I made a 2nd board that had two options for video RAM (dynamic and static).

    A year or so ago, I built a 3rd prototype. This one failed, as I was unable to get it to work well - it kept resetting, with no known cause so far.

    In a few days or so I'll have a 4th prototype PCB in my hands, which is scaled back a lot from the 3rd. Hopefully it will work well, and then I'll slowly expand it to where I want it to end up. It will not, however, end up being a CV2. It will still be in the "1" range.

    Is there any progress on this project.. ??

  2. Posted

    There is a relatively cheap source for TMS9900 CPUs on eBay, but you won't find them in that search. Look for S9900 chips. Milpartsonline has them as sets of four for $10. These are NOS chips from the second source for TI chips. They also made S9901s, S9902s, and S9914s.

     

    I have my personal supply of the various TI chips, but they are not for sale. I do tend to avoid the ones from China--but oddly enough, some of those have turned out to be OK as well, as they are apparently fakes made using the original masks. . .

    The S9900 looks like a good alternative to a TMS9900... did they make a S9995 (TMS9995 copy) ?

  3. Posted

    Hi.

     

    Do they still make TMS9900 CPUs (New) in one form or another ?? I know you can still get 'Old' TMS9995 etc but they are usually quite expensive. You also see a lot of old (Pulls) on ebay TMS9900,TMS9995,TMS9901 etc but you hear conflicting stories on their quality ?

     

    There is an official VHDL TMS9995 core ?? But I don't think it's actually been put onto Silicon ?

    I've also seen on the Forum talk of a ' 68689 ' but I've never seen one do they really exist ? Is there a datasheert for them ?

     

    So where is the best place to source TMS99xx ICs ?? it's all rather confusing !!

  4. Posted

    There is an official TMS9995 core FPGA you can license.

     

    I been thinking of doing a 68689 FPGA, it would be best way to replace the old aging TMS9900.

     

    I made a test run up of a seven boards for my own usage with actual 68689 chips, which are rare but you can still get them, and they run like a beauty.

     

    This idea is similar to UK project to produce the Geneve 2 Phoenix, it is long time back burner project, that I hope sees soon the light of day.

     

    If I was not stuck in a poor fourth-world country I would be doing alot more time researching and designing some neat things.

    Can you still get the 68689 .. I've never seen one !!

  5. Posted

    I suppose there's several ways to do this..

     

    1) Approach several commercial companies that do this sort of thing and see if they are interested ? Though they'll be looking at things purely from a financial MONEY point of view. There's also the matter of Intellectual Property right which are probably still owned by Texas Instruments, so they'd want a cut !

     

    2) Once you've got a working prototype (even one just on an Altera DE Board) then you could do Crowd Funding to generate enough Money to get a limited production run.. But who would back it ?

     

    3) If you've got the Guts and the Money just do it yourself .. get several quotes from companies doing this sort of thing and do a production run yourself... though this will be VERY expensive !

AtariAge
Forums
Store
General
Follow AtariAge

Copyright ©1998-2021 AtariAge

×
×
  • Create New...