Jump to content
IGNORED

In development - SD card based Multicart


Recommended Posts

The game bomb Jake which only runs on 320kb as a xex file is also around as a cartridge which runs on 64k

 

IIRC there is some logic in that cart that makes it quite complicated dumping the cart and putting it in something that just does a bankswitch translation.

 

I'm wondering whether it would be possible to support this game too and who has a dump? Tried to contact author/seller of game several times without any luck so far.

 

Does this new cart come with a reset button btw?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Prowizard,

 

It looks like the cartridge version of bomb jake used the corina cartridge which I was only very dimly aware of.

I had a quick look at the specs in the altirra hardware reference manual and it looks like my cartridge hardware would be able to support it.

But I'd need at the very least a dump of the corina ROM, assuming the authors ever made this available...

 

Did anything else use these cartridges?

 

Robin

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It looks like the cartridge version of bomb jake used the corina cartridge which I was only very dimly aware of.

I had a quick look at the specs in the altirra hardware reference manual and it looks like my cartridge hardware would be able to support it.

But I'd need at the very least a dump of the corina ROM, assuming the authors ever made this available...

 

Did anything else use these cartridges?

 

Yes, they also released the Corrina ROM for "Yie Another Kung Fu".

 

You can download both ROM's here: Corrina Games

 

Neither of these will run correctly in Altirra yet. There was a special version of the Atari++ emulator released along with the Yie Another Kung Fu ROM that will run both games correctly.

It can be downloaded Here: Yie Another Kung Fu - Atari++ & ROM

Edited by MrFish
  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi,

I see you have support for the Williams 64k Roms.

The!Cart also supports the Williams 64k's, but no support of Williams 32k Roms.

Will there be any support for Williams 32k Roms?

 

Here are some Roms to test if you want to add it.

attachicon.gifWilliams 32k Roms.zip

 

Thank you,

Doug

 

Doug - thanks for the ROMs. I'd already added support for Williams 32k, just forgot it on my list. But hadn't be able to test since didn't have any ROMs until now!

 

Robin

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

One other idea, is there anyway to support stackable carts? For example, SDX and Action!?

 

That and an RTC that emulated an R-time 8 would be amazing.

The way the turbofreezer does that is very smart. It puts sdx in bank 64. So bank 0..63 are available for carts.

 

If you study turbofreezer technical details or ask hiassoft that will give more insight. I would appreciate this a lot... and now I'm thinking of that. When you could find a way of supporting R/W on the SD card, next step would be a driver for sdx so there can be I/O on the sd card too. (How amazing would that be ). I'm pretty sure Flashjazzcat is willing to help with that driver.

 

Great project!

 

Will there be a reset button on this cart? (I already asked but I might have missed the answer)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Gozar - good ideas!

 

My plan is to concentrate on finishing the final PCB for the next few days.

The software and hardware are now "complete" in that I now have something that does what I originally planned to do - i.e. allow pretty much any cartridge or ROM to be run from an SD card.

 

However, the flexibility of the hardware (since I'm using an FPGA) allows a lot more to be done with this cartridge. That's both a blessing and a curse -

Stackable carts, corrina support, rtime8 emulation, writeable carts (e.g. atarimax, corina), co-processor support should all be do-able with the current hardware.

The problem is going to be finding the time to write the firmware to support all this.

 

I think the best way forwards is probably for me to concentrate on finishing the hardware, then making a few copies for those interested (I'll open an orders thread once ready). That way others can get their hands on the cartridge, and hopefully some will be interested in adding features to the software. I will be open-sourcing the whole design and there will be a programming port on the cartridge, so the firmware can be upgraded and flashed at home.

 

Robin

  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Prowizard,

 

I wasn't planning on a reset button, but willing to have my mind changed :-)

 

How does this work on The!Cart? There's nothing on the cartridge port that allows me to reset the atari...

 

I remember a thread about changing the state of RD5 and this causes the Atari to do a cold restart on pressing the reset button on the atari. But that's dependendent on the late state VBI, which can be disabled by software.

 

Any pointers would be useful...

 

Robin

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Prowizard,

 

I wasn't planning on a reset button, but willing to have my mind changed :-)

 

How does this work on The!Cart? There's nothing on the cartridge port that allows me to reset the atari...

 

I remember a thread about changing the state of RD5 and this causes the Atari to do a cold restart on pressing the reset button on the atari. But that's dependendent on the late state VBI, which can be disabled by software.

 

Any pointers would be useful...

 

Robin

Not a reset for the atari but for the cart! I dislike powercycles of my atari. So pressing reset makes the cart go to bank 0 so after pressing the atari reset button it restarts the cart to power up state (with the menu)

 

I love myide 2 and from the start I have been telling that one of the important things missing on this thing is a reset key.

 

Please think it over.

I use this types of carts for coding purposes and then a reset button is my friend. There are situations where a power cycle of the atari would kill the ramdisk data. ... that's another reason for me to have that button :)

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

There's about 40k of ram on the max 10, plus 1 megabyte of SRAM externally on the board, so I imagine it would be fairly straightforward to implement veronica on the board, assuming there's an opencores version of the 68516...

 

I do plan to fit a JTAG header to the final board - but I'm still fairly early on as far as designing that goes....

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If you study turbofreezer technical details or ask hiassoft that will give more insight. I would appreciate this a lot... and now I'm thinking of that. When you could find a way of supporting R/W on the SD card, next step would be a driver for sdx so there can be I/O on the sd card too. (How amazing would that be ). I'm pretty sure Flashjazzcat is willing to help with that driver.

 

 

Wait, this cart could also be used as a hard drive?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hmmm it probably could..... I seem to have designed something with even more possibilities than I'd realised!

 

If SDX is flexible enough to allow a files to be accessed through the cartridge port (which it must be for SIDE etc) then I guess this cartridge has all the hardware required for a SD-card based filesystem (except perhaps the real time clock)

 

It would need appropriate firmware obviously, and an SDX driver to be written. It might even be possible to have the multi-cart functionality and the "hard drive" functionality in the same firmware and choose at boot.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

If you map some read/write registers in CCTL, you're half way there. You'd also need some way to completely disable the ROM in the cart window so that software requiring RAM at $A000 would work. The other matter is whether we have an SPI driver in 6502 assembler, or device firmware which does the hard grunt (6502 perhaps serving and reading up 128K chunks to and from a buffer in CCTL).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hmmm it probably could..... I seem to have designed something with even more possibilities than I'd realised!

 

If SDX is flexible enough to allow a files to be accessed through the cartridge port (which it must be for SIDE etc) then I guess this cartridge has all the hardware required for a SD-card based filesystem (except perhaps the real time clock)

 

It would need appropriate firmware obviously, and an SDX driver to be written. It might even be possible to have the multi-cart functionality and the "hard drive" functionality in the same firmware and choose at boot.

 

This is prett close to the Holy Grail!!! Wow... Now I am definitely saving up me pennies!!!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The more that I read about the possibilities of this project, the more excited I get about it!

 

Yup - me too! This is going to be a seriously important project!

 

If it can function as a SD->PBI harddrive adapter then it could replace the "SIDE2" totally for "Ultimate1MB" users - therefore act as a hugely extensible multicart and a hard-drive. Obviously you would need some kind of formalized partitioning scheme, so one for the APT section, one for the 'SIDELoader' and then a third for the cartridge images... In fact I suppose you could store cartridge *.BIN's and *.CAR's inside a subfolder of the SIDELoader FAT32 partition... Obviously these are just blue-sky ideas, but... woah... This thing's middle name is going to be 'versatility'!!!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...