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I got my Analogue pocket in recently; what a system! Not only can you play all the classic carts on it, but many many cores are supported in FPGA, both for consoles and for arcade. Info on getting that setup here: Here is also a video with some great tips and tricks: Let's discuss and share tips and tricks in this thread! For the record my Dock is in, as is my GameGear adaptor, but the second set of adaptors has yet to arrive. Here I am playing some TG-16 Bonk's Adventure on mine:

I'm looking to trade my Super NT and AVS systems. I'm the original owner of both. I'm mainly interested in getting a good 600XL or 800XL for them. I'm located in North Carolina 27707. Thanks!

The community support keeps making the Pocket better all the time!

This is the one everyone has been waiting for!

*** Tomy Tutor/Pyuuta/PyuutaJr: Games & Homebrews MegaPack for MiSTer and MAME - by TMOP *** Due to the recent release of the beta core for Tomy Tutor for MiSTer FPGA (see MiSTer Tomy Tutor Core) I decided to prepare a MegaPack to have in one .zip all the released games and homebrews. I've also included a Excel file in which, for each game/homebrew, there are the tests results and some additional information. If you have some carts/homebrews not in this pack, but in the list, please share them, so can be included in the next update! Have fun! ? TomyTutor_Pyuuta_MiSTer_FPGA_Core_v1.0.0_08052022_by_TMOP.zip TomyTutor_Pyuuta_SW_List_V1.0.0.xlsx

A new core for MiSTer FPGA is available for Tomy Tutor/Pyuta/PyutaJr. It's from @Flandango that was also working on the lates updates on the TI99 core on MiSTer (he added disk, TIPI, SAMS, F18A, etc. support to the TI99 core). ? It's the initial version and you can read more on the official MiSTer forum: Tomy Tutor. I'm not an expert for this system, so I cannot help him testing as I've done for the TI, however I'm sure some on the community will help him for the tests and improvements.

This is my first attempt in FPGA world. To prove myself that I'm capable of I made this simple VGA 640x480 output via FPGA Cyclone II develop board (https://tinyurl.com/2p9xbyxn) for the glorious Mattel Aquarius. I connected directly to the bus on cartridge slot to get the 16bit address line and I soldered 8 wires directly to the data pins (D0-D7) on the Z80 cpu. Unfortunately the databus pins (DE0-DE7) on cartridge slot are not connected directly to the cpu (as those of the address bus), but instead there is PLA2 chip that routes signals, so I had to solder wires directly to the cpu. My verilog code listen to memory writes on address between 0x3000 and 0x3800 and catch bytes to characters and color memory, then reproduce the screen image using a character generator based on bitmapped chars image (found here on this forum )plus a color decoder based on TEA1002 specifications. I'm on early prototype stage. If you are intrested on this project I've planned a little radmap: adding colorful (8bit RGB332) hardware sprites (controlled via simples POKEs to screen memory) adding paged screen memory (and break the 2k barrier) adding hw scrolling adding pcm sounds (mod or similar) adding hw timers (via NMI interrupt) and finally bring the "a system for the seventies" at least to the "system for the nineties" Here's a short video

Is this a good option for transporting the Analogue Pocket?

Thought I would share this video from RMC. Definitely looking forward to further information and details (especially pricing). May have to finally jump into the FPGA pool.

And I do plan to jailbreak it in a future video.

My MiSTer FPGA set-up, and some questions/issues... First of all, here's my MiSTer FPGA set-up, in a basic aluminum box that I found in the garage. I had a smaller box available, but the USB hub would have had difficulty in fitting, and I didn't want this to be an exercise in getting something to fit into something really small. It's not too fancy, but it'll only sit behind or underneath the TV anyway. Maybe I'll paint it red, or better yet, put an Atari logo on it. With many of these types of boards, it can be annoying that there's I/O on several sides of the board, making it sometimes difficult to put the thing in a generic box. I opted to put the board in a corner, so on the left side in the pictures, there's power and HDMI, and on the front is the MicroSD card, and breakout from the USB hub. I did make sure the USB hub only had inputs on one end. I forgot to buy an OTG hub with microSD connection, so I have a separate OTG adapter cable plugged in between the MiSTer and the USB hub. Plugged into the USB hub I have a wi-fi dongle, and mini-keyboard dongle. There's of course space for USB controller. I have a 32 MB SDRAM board plugged into the DE10-nano board. This SDRAM will play about 98% of the games/systems available, and only cost about $20-25 instead of $80-100. Apparently when you buy the DE10-nano board from different places, there are different extras such as power supply, cable, and 8 GB microSD card. I bought from Digi-Key, and it came with all these. I'm using a 32GB card, but I think the supplied 8 GB card likely would have been enough (at least enough to start with), unless getting into CD based games, and that sort of thing. The MiSTer also seems to play well with zip files, which is a bonus. I'm also currently using an HDMI to VGA adapter. This a ~$10 device. I made sure it included a 3.5mm audio output. Note that my MiSTer does not have the standard stack of 3 boards that you'll often see. That's too pricey for me. I'll probably switch to HDMI to a large TV, but for now, the VGA adapter works well on my desk. One thing I'll be looking for is a heatsink for the FPGA. I'm still looking for one that is cheap and uses tape to connect. If you want a simple set-up that can play thousands and thousands of games, get the DE10-nano from Digi-Key ($135), 32MB SDRAM ($20), OTG USB hub ($10), wired keyboard (you have already?), wired mouse if you want (you have already?), USB SNES controller ($15), case ($10), heatsink ($10). All prices estimated. Total is about $200 US. Not too cheap, but in my opinion, great value, for a very stable system. So far I've been pretty happy with the system. There's definitely some growing pains, setting up different things, though. It took me a while, with a few false start with some of the scripts out there, but I found a script that downloads all the arcade ROMs, as well as updating other things. Search for "All-in-one script for updating your MiSTer". Next is the good news, bad news, for the controller. I had been testing with a cheap SNEZ USB controller, which worked okay for what it was, but I really wanted to make my own controller... one that fits my style of play, and my style of games that I like to play. So, I built this: The thing is huge. I'm not compensating for anything, except for years of trying to use controllers for all sorts of systems, most of which don't work well for me. I wanted a single controller that would do all the things I wanted it to do. I grew up with early '80s arcade games, and CX-10 style joysticks, and really, anything else doesn't work for me at all. Don't get me started on D-Pads where I can only effectively move in one of 4 directions successfully. That's just me... my kids seem to do just fine. Anyway, I've got a digital joystick, analog joystick, paddle, keypad for Intellivision/ColecoVision, menu/select/start buttons, a shift button (for some reason), and a bunch of multi-colored buttons. Also space for a keyboard, that I'll Velcro on at some point. I'm not likely to get into the computers too much, but if I do, I'd be using a different keyboard than this one. This one was lying around, so here it is. If I had to buy another mini keyboard today, I'd find one a bit bigger, with clearer lettering (for computers, I'd buy something at or near full size). The digital joystick and main buttons use leaf switches, so they're pretty quiet, which works best for me. The joystick has a circular "gate" - for me this is fine, as I've never had a problem playing Pac-Man or Time Pilot or whatever else on this type of joystick. I don't need 2/4/8 way gates. Your mileage may vary. I haven't built a case yet, but so far I'm happy with it physically. If I can get it working well, I'll build a simple wooden frame for it. The panel is built from an aluminum/plastic/aluminum laminated sheet that I had in the garage. I quickly painted it black. It holds fingerprints well. If I like the joystick the way it is, maybe I'll fix it up so it looks better. Maybe not - it's not too bad right now. Unfortunately, however, I seem to have spent money on the wrong thing. I bought an Ultimarc A-PAC which can handle up to 4 analog controls and quite a few buttons, including enough for the keypad. I thought it had a couple more, actually, but I was able to double up on some of the buttons vs. keypad, so it's okay. It's perfect, except that the A-PAC is intended to be used for 2 players on the one USB input, but the MiSTer FPGA is intended to be used one player per USB input. There doesn't seem to be a way to use two joysticks for one player. I did some quick rewiring, so at the moment the analog controller and the keypad can't really be used, but the basic digital controls can be. If anyone has any suggestions on how best to proceed on getting all the controls to work, that would be awesome! Ideally with the existing A-PAC, but if I need to build/buy something else, that's not the end of the world, either. There's a few other quirks in the MiSTer FPGA, but I'm sure I'll get those figured out at some point... coin and start buttons for the arcade games, and getting the paddle controller set up for the Atari 2600 core simply/easily. Other than the controller issues I've got, I'm very happy with the MiSTer FPGA. This is basically my Zimba 3000 system. It's got everything I need in one package, and hopefully one day, I'll be able to control all the systems with one controller, which for me, will be pretty awesome! A big thank you to anyone who's contributed to the MiSTer FPGA project!

Great news - FPGAzumSpass, one of the FPGA titans in the MiSTer project, is working on a Lynx core

Pokeymax v3 is now available for pre-order. Features: Quad Pokey Dual SID Dual PSG Four channel Covox, with Paula style DMA GTIA audio digital pass though SIO audio mixing PBI audio mixing May be updated/configured via software on Atari Larger 10M16 FPGA, leaving adequate resources for future enhancements Spare 5V safe IO for future enhancements For the pre-orders Retronics are offering a special promotional price of 99USD. Note that version 2 will remain available for the simpler mono/stereo Pokey/Covox options. --- Ordering info from @Duddie --- Additional features confirmed: SPDIF digital output (TTL level, excludes SIO in/PBI in) PS2 keyboard input

As discussed a little yesterday in the Pandemic club 4A zoom call (thanks for the interesting discussion!) I started to look a bit how the GPL interpreter could be optimised. My original idea was to add some instructions to my FPGA processor core to speed up the interpretation with special purpose instructions, but as I started to look at the code it's quite clear that a lot can be achieved with normal code optimisation. @RXB mentioned that there has been a discussion with @Tursi about this topic. I somehow recall seeing that thread myself, but couldn't easily find it (which is probably my fault). As an obvious optimisation, instead of the multiple levels of tables, the GPL instruction decoding could be improved at the cost of using some more memory simply by having a 256 entry lookup table (occupying 512 bytes). For that part I could create a new instruction which could combine a few TMS9900 instructions, in pseudo code: // Address 0x78 MOVB *R13,R9 JGPL @TABLE,R9 // Here JGPL would be a new instuction, something like below. // The instruction would only perform 2 memory fetches: Read R9, and fetch the jump vector from TABLE. BANK 1 // Switch bottom 8K to a new bank, which has the jump table MOV R9,TEMP // Temp internal register SRL TEMP,7 // TEMP >> 7, shift to a word index MOV @TABLE(TEMP),TEMP // Fetch from table BANK 0 // Switch bottom 8K to normal bank B *TEMP In the arrangement above since the opcode would be passed to the new instruction JGPL, that instruction could also be developed further to understand some GPL instructions directly, executing them directly by the CPU instead of TMS9900. Many GPL instructions are quite involved, so it would best to be able to incrementally improve things, for example starting with branch instructions which seem to be rather simple. I also realised that I am jumping the gun - I should try to look at some GPL code before going to optimization phase to understand how things work. To that end I started using xga99.py to assemble the GPL code for Minimemory cartridge, as a test. Also since I think this a very cool cartridge which could be integrated and expanded in interesting ways in both my icy99 and StrangeCart projects. So I got the GPL source code for Minimemory from Thierry's excellent TI-99/4A tech pages. I guess that code is for his GPL assembler. But I wanted to use the xdt99 package. So I started to assemble the source with xga99.py, like so: xga99.py --aorg 6000 mmg.gpl -L mmg.lst I quite quickly ran into a few problems, due to differences in syntax, for example: The AORG directive in xdt99 does not accept addresses higher than 8K. This causes a number of problems, because there is a hole in the code, i.e. it AORGs to >70AC skipping a bunch of bytes. I guess I have to manually fill that range with some bytes. The multiplication instruction in the source is MPY, but xga99 uses MUL. Not a biggie. Many lines in the code contain comments (which is great) after the code. I have never understood why the comments don't start with a special character like semicolon or something, that would make parsing easier for the assembler and it could probably also prevent some mistakes. Anyway, xga99 could not assemble a number of lines because the comments were separated by just a space. I just removed those comments after the code (by moving them to a separate comment line). The HTEX instruction (in a FMT block) escapes hex bytes differently, simple change: from HTEX '[>0A]' to HTEX >0A Some other opcodes also are different: CAR -> CARRY, PARS -> PARSE, DCGTE -> DCGT The source code uses the BIAS command also outside a FMT - FEND block, it appears to specify a constant to be added to strings specified with the STRI directive. The source I used has first BIAS >60 to set the TI Basic character code offset. I did not find a way to replicate this functionality in xda99. The advice goes: "use the source, Luke". And so I did, and created a new directive STRI60 for xda99, as follows. It's hack for sure, but I didn't want to enter the text as BYTE statements. * Original source (disassembled and commented by Thierry) BIAS >60 G6E1A STRI "ILLEGAL TAG" G6E26 STRI "CHECKSUM ERROR" ---------------------------------- * Modified source for xda99: *EPEP BIAS >60 G6E1A STRI60 "ILLEGAL TAG" G6E26 STRI60 "CHECKSUM ERROR ---------------------------------- * xda99.py has been modified to support the new STRI60 as follows: # EP 2020-12-13 added new STRI60 operation to add the screen offset to each byte. # Used for Mini Memory porting @staticmethod def STRI60(asm, label, ops): asm.process_label(label) text = ''.join(asm.parser.text(op) for op in ops) asm.emit(len(text), *[ord(c)+0x60 for c in text]) And this is roughly where I am at the moment. I am comparing the generated GPL binary image to the original, and now the first >770 bytes match (except for the pointer to >70AC due the AORG stuff, need to come up with a solution for that - probably I'll just fill in the empty range with some bytes) to get to 70AC.

*SOLD* *SOLD* *SOLD* Hi everyone! This is my first post here, so I hope I’m doing this right. I have a bundle of goodies to sell. Everything is practically new except for the Ecco games. The games have some wear but still are probably better overall than most copies out there. They were the best I could find at the time, and I can send pictures if I need to. Everything else looks perfect and was bought within the last four months. I only used the HDMI switch on a 1080p TV, so I haven’t tried out the 4K and HDR functionality. 1x Analogue Mega Sg (Complete in box with all original accessories) 1x 8bitdo M30 2.4ghz Controller with Genesis Adapter 2x Retro-Bit 6 Button Controllers (Licensed by Sega) 1x Sandisk Ultra 16gb SD Card 1x 10ft Male to Female 3.5mm Audio Cable 1x 5 Port 4K 60hz HDR HDMI Switch with Remote 1x Ecco The Dolphin (Complete in box with manual) 1x Ecco: The Tides of Time (Complete in box with manual) For those that don’t know, the Mega Sg is a FPGA clone of the Sega Genesis. It’s a great way to play your Genesis games on a modern TV since it doesn’t add any input lag beyond the TV. It also has a previously unreleased game by DICE called “Ultracore” on the system. It also can play Master System games with the included cartridge adapter (still wrapped in plastic), and there are more adapters available to buy that allow you to play Game Gear, Sega My Card, SG-1000, SC-3000 games. Oh, and the system can easily be jailbroken to play games from a SD card. The system can also be customized by simulating scanlines and adjusting the sound. Since the Genesis had several models with different sound chips, it caused trouble with some games audio depending on the console model. The Mega Sg allows you to fix this by switching a setting on or off as needed. The Mega Sg is also region free and accepts cartridges from all regions without modification. There’s a couple of very good Mega Sg reviews by My Life in Gaming and Digital Foundry on YouTube if you want to know more. It also doesn’t have any sound lag like the Genesis Mini. I paid around $350 for everything listed here including tax and shipping. The Mega Sg alone was $190 plus $17 shipping. I’m asking $225 for everything including shipping within the lower 48 USA. If you are worried about me being new on here, I can point you to an amateur astronomy website where I have a lot of feedback from buying and selling things. I take very good care in packaging my items, and I will provide a tracking number. Thanks for looking!!!

Hello all! I like to drop in and show people things that they may not know, or might not have seen before, and as have been a lurker here for years, I thought someone might get a kick out of seeing a full resolution teardown of the Analogue Nt First Edition NES/Famicom console. Serial Number 000123. Let me know if you have any questions I might be able to answer, but otherwise, enjoy! 1. The Aluminum Case; 2. The Nt Motherboard 3. The CPU/PPU Daughterboards; 4. The Zimba Labs (Kevtris) 6502A FPGA HDMI Board; 5. Board/Chip Closeups; 6. Misc. Board Oddities; I hope everyone enjoys the photos as much as I enjoyed tearing down this amazing chunk of engineering! (First Post!)

Announcing a TI-99/2 on a FPGA. It uses an open source FPGA board, the Radiona ULX3S: The board has a GPDI connector that can be used to send video to an HDMI display and this is used by the TI-99/2 implementation. The USB2 connector is used to hook up a PS/2 keyboard. The TI-99/2 uses only a fraction of the board's capacity. It could easily hold a TI-99/4A, or a Geneve or TI-99/8. In fact, it can run a Minimig Amiga or a simple Linux. Unfortunately, the board is currently sold out, but a new production run is planned: https://www.crowdsupply.com/radiona/ulx3s The TI-99/2 code is written in Verilog and can be synthesised using the open source Yosys/NextPNR/Trellis tool chain. The full source code is here: https://gitlab.com/pnru/ti99/tree/master/ti99_2 Output is to the GDPI port and sends an HDMI compatible video stream in VGA resolution (the 256x192 pixel output area is doubled both horizontally and vertically, so each TI-99/2 pixel is 4 VGA pixels). Input is through a PS/2 keyboard (or a PS/2 capable USB keyboard) hooked up to the USB2 port. Cassette I/O and the HEXBUS interface are not implemented. The implementation is of the 32KB ROM version of TI-99/2. The system has been set up with 32KB RAM. All code is plain Verilog and should be easy to port to other FPGA boards. A standard (black&white) VGA signal is generated internally, so it should not be too difficult to run it on a board with a VGA connector. Many thanks to @mizapf and @speccery for their kind help in getting this done. Enjoy!

Again it's been a long while since I wrote anything here... I thought to write a short update about my work on my new FPGA version of the TI-99/4A. This is work in progress. In short, I'm in the process of creating a version for the Blackice-II FPGA board. This is an affordable board (I hope it is still available) with a fairly small ICE40HX4K FPGA chip, 512K RAM and a fairly powerful microcontroller. The board is supported by the open source Icestorm toolchain, and I have used that for development work. This has been an interesting adventure so far. Icestorm very nice and compact toolchain compared to the bloated Xilinx and Altera tools. However, Icestorm only supports the Verilog hardware description language, so I had to learn Verilog and port my existing VHDL code base to Verilog. Most of the work so far (and I have but a fair amount of hours into this already) has gone to porting and modifying the code to work on this fairly limited platform, changing the language to Verilog and designing around the limitations. In the context of recreating the TI-99/4A the biggest drawback is that the small FPGA only has 16K of internal RAM (compared to 64K on the chip I used for the VHDL version). Also, the internal RAM is a lot less sophisticated. The result has been that I have had to redesign the system architecture quite a bit, so that the external 512K RAM chip is now used for code, data and video memory - as opposed to using on-chip RAM for video memory in the past. This may seem like a small change, and in a way it is, but in practice I had to design a much more involved memory controller which can arbitrate between CPU, VDP, and the bootloader accesses in real time. Although I have converted my whole code base to Verilog, currently only a portion of this has been fully ported and works. Namely I have a system now that has the TMS9900 CPU, TMS9918 VDP with VGA output, memory controller driving the external RAM, EVM-BUG debugger in a 8K ROM block, and finally pnr's TMS9902 UART. The ICE40HX4K chip is only supposed to have 4K LUTs (look up tables), but in practice the silicon is the same as ICE40HX8K with 7680 LUTs and the Icestorm toolchain enables access to all of them. Which is good, since the design already uses 4421 LUTs. The design runs at 25MHz, which is the VGA pixel clock. I am hoping I can fit in the whole thing into this FPGA. As the chip's resources gets close to full utilization the routing probably becomes impossible, so I cannot add too much more. I don't know yet where the limit is. One of the consequences of having the VDP use external RAM is that it now is possible to map video RAM to CPU's address space directly, and that is what I have done during debugging (I'm not yet using TI-99/4A ROMs, just EVMBUG). There are now two ways to access VRAM: using the standard indirect registers - this is obviously necessary for compatibility, and alternatively by just directly mapping it to CPU address space. Direct access to VRAM vastly increases the bandwidth and makes it very easy to use, but of course no existing software supports this... Next I need to add GROM support, which should be easy. When that is in place I should be able to boot this thing with the TI-99/4A ROMs. I still need to figure out how to split the 512K RAM between different functions, probably something like this: 8K system ROM (0000..1FFF) 8K disk support (4000..5FFF) 256K paged cartridge space (6000..7FFF) 64K GROM space (24K used by console GROM [actually 18K but multiplies of 2 are easier]) 64K VRAM space 32K normal RAM expansion That leaves 80K still to be allocated to something. If I can fit in my memory paging unit, it probably would make sense to have the ability to configure either 256K AMS memory space or 256K cartridge space.

I've been back-porting some of the EclaireXL features to the various FPGA boards. I've just uploaded the latest core builds to my site, for many of them its the first update in 3 years so I thought its reasonable to announce it here. There are more details here, including highlights on the changes: http://www.64kib.com/redmine/news/57 Please let me know how you get on. I tested each board individually as I went but due to time I can not reasonably go through every single version!

I just recently became aware of this newer device. A more powerful system, supposedly. Does anyone here have one yet? Any thoughts of advantages of one over the other? I can think of one -- MIST can be purchased off-the-shelf, while MISTER may need DIY daughter boards, (which I don't really understand.) I've watched Nir's nice video on the MISTER, but still leaves questions about the boards. I did find this thread here: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/260994-mist-experience-with-atari-8-bit/?hl=+mister -Larry

My references: https://www.heatware.com/u/55794/to Also see my signature for my AA feedback thread. Prices including shipping in the USA. Modded PS1 - The system isn't one I ever had much nostalgia for, though I did have one back in 98/99. I've had it for around 5 months and have played it exactly twice. Since it's in great condition and plays CD-Rs and is region-free for imports, I figure it's better off going to an AA member who will love it. SCPH-9001 modded PlayStation 1 system 1x 3rd-party Dual Shock clone controller. As clones go, it's pretty nice, honestly 1x Sony-branded composite AV cable 1x power cord with the keyed connector to match the system 3x Retro-Bit PS1 memory cards - two are still in the package 1x other third-party PS1 memory card Looking for $70 shipped. SOLD TO SCOOBY105 Everdrive N8 - $95 shipped - comes with 4GB SD card. NO ROMs are included, but the latest firmware is on there. SOLD TO SCOOBY105 RetroUSB AVS - turns out my nostalgia for the NES can be sated by emulation. Got this in the latest batch of preorders in February. Comes with the following: Original mini USB and power adapter HDMI cable Original box with manual OEM Nintendo controllers with Tomee extension cord Asking $160 shipped.

What is your thoughts on FPGA arcade board replacements? For those who don't know a FPGA is a special chip that can be programed to actually become other chips so it can emulate hardware in hardware which can come close to a perfect re-implementation or replacement if done right. Unlike MAME you can make the chip run at the same speed and act and load the ROM in the same way and have the same exact bugs and you can update the outputs to more modern outputs like Displayport, HDMI or just regular VGA. There are current projects that have re-implemented some games and there are even replacement boards on the market. I know there is a Williams multi FPGA board and a Berzerk FPGA. There also is the MiST FPGA project that is implementing arcade chipsets with some that are Works In Progress. What are your thoughts on this? Is this okay to preserve faulty boards like Berzerk that may not survive much longer. Which boards or games do you think are in need of an FPGA implementation? What are your thoughts on this in general?

Hello all! I've been chatting with some people on this forum and decided to start posting updates here on my project to emulate discrete game chips. There are no true emulations, and only a few simulations have been done so far due to the fact that they don't contain microprocessors and because most of the circuitry is inside a literal black box. Hopefully this will change soon. https://nerdstuffbycole.blogspot.com/2019/03/febuary-progress-update.html