FPGA Based Videogame System

[Tanooki]

I hate micro sized cards, too fragile and too easy to lose as if SD cards aren't enough already. If the J is just the G and H board which just tweaks one fairly pointless thing that's good as it won't be lacking for anyone with rev.G forward. H puts a pre-amp but G had firmware code to get nearly the same result, and J if that's just a tinier card slot -- bfd thankfully. I did in fact use that 15% off coupon + a made offer on a sd2snes yesterday and ordered it, and it got shipped out early this morning too. Now to just sell the super ed+dsp I have I my desk here waiting to take pictures.

[Jurai]

Is there a good thread tracking the board revisions?

[Tanooki]

No, I had to go digging using google. Firmware seems well tracked in many places, but not the hardware. I had to google for changes by revision of the board and each one I found on another gaming web forum.

[cacophony]

No, I had to go digging using google. Firmware seems well tracked in many places, but not the hardware. I had to google for changes by revision of the board and each one I found on another gaming web forum.

 

At the moment Discord chat is the best way to know what's going on. There's some significant stuff coming.

[Jurai]

 

At the moment Discord chat is the best way to know what's going on. There's some significant stuff coming.

 

Got an invite link to their server? I'm curious what's in the pipeline, with how established the board is at this point I would be curious what major changes they are trying to bring to bear that would ostracize the existing owners

[NE146]

 

Got an invite link to their server? I'm curious what's in the pipeline, with how established the board is at this point I would be curious what major changes they are trying to bring to bear that would ostracize the existing owners

 

https://discord.gg/EX57xnF

[Jurai]

 

https://discord.gg/EX57xnF

 

Thanks, cursory glance it sounds like most of the revisions have been around tweaking MSU-1 output for the most part, didn't immediately see info on forthcoming revisions though

[Tanooki]

They have and there's more to come, but whether it's another lettered revision or something of a redesign, in the end you'll still have the same feature set perhaps as some kind of finalized setup for ease. The thing is from the G release where they firmware fixed the muffled and low msu-1 audio, to the H with it done as a hardware amp added onto it instead, the core design is there. The only option other would be to revise the board with a larger FPGA to fit more possible code, but seeing as it appears you can swap things in and out which get beefier stuff like the risc based fx chip and now the sa1 going I can't imagine other than for ease. Maybe a new feature set outside of the direct 90s realm of what the SFC/SNES could do would be about it but that would be good for some, fluff for a lot of others who just need the special chips that matter working.

 

I can't wait for my cartridge to arrive which for now appears to be Monday which is a shame, hopefully it will squeeze in on Saturday. I revised my old memory card off the super everdrive+dsp one with the latest smokemonster v6 build which has the sa1 and fx goodies present, and I've been grabbing the sa1 beta revisions too.

 

I'll be selling the SuperED+DSP off with a brand new clean 8GB SD card with the EDOS installed, cart, krikzz manual, clear clamshell box and the card once I can take a couple pics which will very well help deflate the price. I've not bought much on ebay for awhile, last month nothing but some Capsela 80s toys for my daughter to learn and play from, and this month just 2 flash kits.

[cacophony]

I'm most excited about the possibility of save states, which probably needs the beefier hardware

[NE146]

I'm most excited about the possibility of save states, which probably needs the beefier hardware

 

I believe save states are possible currently.. but you have to use an external PC w/ the USB port. Probably not worth the hassle for most.

[Jurai]

They have and there's more to come, but whether it's another lettered revision or something of a redesign, in the end you'll still have the same feature set perhaps as some kind of finalized setup for ease. The thing is from the G release where they firmware fixed the muffled and low msu-1 audio, to the H with it done as a hardware amp added onto it instead, the core design is there. The only option other would be to revise the board with a larger FPGA to fit more possible code, but seeing as it appears you can swap things in and out which get beefier stuff like the risc based fx chip and now the sa1 going I can't imagine other than for ease. Maybe a new feature set outside of the direct 90s realm of what the SFC/SNES could do would be about it but that would be good for some, fluff for a lot of others who just need the special chips that matter working.

 

I can't wait for my cartridge to arrive which for now appears to be Monday which is a shame, hopefully it will squeeze in on Saturday. I revised my old memory card off the super everdrive+dsp one with the latest smokemonster v6 build which has the sa1 and fx goodies present, and I've been grabbing the sa1 beta revisions too.

 

I'll be selling the SuperED+DSP off with a brand new clean 8GB SD card with the EDOS installed, cart, krikzz manual, clear clamshell box and the card once I can take a couple pics which will very well help deflate the price. I've not bought much on ebay for awhile, last month nothing but some Capsela 80s toys for my daughter to learn and play from, and this month just 2 flash kits.

 

I need to replace my everdrives eventually, I love his stuff but being an early adopter always bites me in the ass down the line

Edited August 10, 2018 by Jurai

[spoonman]

I bought the SD2SNES directly from Krikzz.com, during the last Black Friday sale in November 2017. The downside of this is that Krikzz became very backed up with orders and my order didn't even ship out until January 2nd, 2018.

 

 

I do think it was worth the wait to buy it brand new for only $157.60.

 

As a long time user of the old SNES backup units from the early 90's (Super Magicom, Super Wild Card DX, Pro Fighter X). It was awesome to have roms load instantly. I was used to waiting a couple of minutes for a 32Mb game to load with my previous copiers. I had also paid around $400 or so for those copiers, so the SD2SNES felt like a bargain.

 

 

I would love to see real-time save support come to the SD2SNES. Then I could box up my SWC DX for safe keeping. I'd even settle for the less than perfect implementation, as seen with the SWC DX copier. It worked well enough to have it be useful.

 

[Tanooki]

There's a name I haven't seen in a long time, spoonman. I haven't seen that or the name super magicom thrown around in a long time too as my friend had one of those and we loved putting SNES goodies on those floppies. That $157 is what i just spent on a SD2SNES the other day due to that 15% off sale coupon ebay ran, and selling my super ed+dsp will lower that further thankfully.

 

Reading up on that discord for the kit I think that your real time save idea is coming along, just looks like it may require a revised version of the device that has a larger capacity chip to do it though. I've never been much for using stuff like that so I'm glad to know even if they're going that way with it, game (chipped or not) functionality will stay the same so like everyone wins it appears.

[Andromeda Stardust]

I prefer the regular sized SD cards... those micro ones are easy to loose on a dark textured carpet.

And the vacuum cleaner slurps them right up!

[Andromeda Stardust]

I bought the SD2SNES directly from Krikzz.com, during the last Black Friday sale in November 2017. The downside of this is that Krikzz became very backed up with orders and my order didn't even ship out until January 2nd, 2018.

I do think it was worth the wait to buy it brand new for only $157.60.

As a long time user of the old SNES backup units from the early 90's (Super Magicom, Super Wild Card DX, Pro Fighter X). It was awesome to have roms load instantly. I was used to waiting a couple of minutes for a 32Mb game to load with my previous copiers. I had also paid around $400 or so for those copiers, so the SD2SNES felt like a bargain.

I would love to see real-time save support come to the SD2SNES. Then I could box up my SWC DX for safe keeping. I'd even settle for the less than perfect implementation, as seen with the SWC DX copier. It worked well enough to have it be useful.

Considering many later Roms had to be split across discs, yeah. There was also an n64 device that used 100mb zip disks, though I'm not sure if it had enough memory for >32m byte games like Conkers and Paper Mario.

[spoonman]

Considering many later Roms had to be split across discs, yeah. There was also an n64 device that used 100mb zip disks, though I'm not sure if it had enough memory for >32m byte games like Conkers and Paper Mario.

 

It was much slower even when loading the rom from a PC.

 

I had joined all of my roms, removed all intros/cracktros/trainers, and then I would send them from a small "boxed PC" which I assembled from a mini-ATX board, hdd, and CDROM drive.

A friend of mine (who went on to graduate from Digipen, and also landed a job for Nintendo), wrote a small DOS rom sender for me which sorted all of the games via title, year, # of players, company) and displayed them on a small 9" monochrome CRT, which I grabbed from Babbage's when they decided to update their registers.

 

You can see the monitor under the SNES + SWC DX. I really loved this setup!

Here is the old rom list: http://www.videogameobsession.com/personal/snesdisc/1sdus.htm

It took me ages to dump about 200+ of these from original, rented carts, and the ones I found on international BBS's racked up a huge phone bill. I can't say it wasn't a blast though.

Before sending the games from PC I would use floppies. I found that formatting them as 1.6Mb (12Megabits) worked great. It could fit an entire 12Mb game (such as Rabbit Rampage), or fit 24Mb games nicely on 2 disks. They also had room left over for the SRAM battery data, and Real-Time Saves took up almost no space so I'd keep many of those as well.

 

Here's my old Pro Fighter X setup with diskettes. All labeled with box art and MEG/company/Date info.

 

BTW, the Official SNES Player's Guide was all too perfect for using as floppy diskette cover art! The cutout box art + info fit perfectly. The info was very useful since it gave the file size and weather or not it used SRAM. I would always recommend it to people buying these copiers.

 

 

Probably more than anyone cared to know, but once I get on a topic I am passionate about, I tend to keep on going. Haha

[spoonman]

There was also an n64 device that used 100mb zip disks, though I'm not sure if it had enough memory for >32m byte games like Conkers and Paper Mario.

 

As far as N64 copiers go, I bought the Doctor V64 in 1996.

 

It utilized a CD-ROM drive, and came with 128Mbits of DRAM. I also bought the 128Mb DRAM expansion, which allowed it to play all 256Mb and below rom.

Since the V64 was the copier of choice for rom dumping it also meant that owners of this didn't have to worry about byte swapping the roms to use on their model. And many of the crack patches also didn't work with other copiers.

 

IIRC, the only N64 copier which could handle 512Mb roms was the V64 Jr. It was a small parallel port connected only device. I never bothered buying one because I liked not having it tethered to a PC. The CD-ROM was nice and fast for transferring roms (especially after upgrading it to a 52x).

 

There were only 6 games which I couldn't play due to their size being over 256Mbits, and I eventually just bought the carts for them.

AIDYN CHRONICLES / Size: 512Mb

CONKER BAD FURDAY / Size:512Mb

OGRE BATTLE 64 / Size:320Mb

PAPER MARIO / Size:320Mb

POKEMON STADIUM 2 / Size:512Mb

RESIDENT EVIL II / Size:512Mb

 

[Andromeda Stardust]

wait, how do you force format a 1.4Mb floppy disc (1.38Mb usable after formatting) to 1.6Mb? The math does not add up.

[Great Hierophant]

wait, how do you force format a 1.4Mb floppy disc (1.38Mb usable after formatting) to 1.6Mb? The math does not add up.

??:

This way :

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format

[cybercylon]

My understanding has been that the basic hardware for the SD2SNES has been finalized (that is what Ikari has said) aside from revisions that improve MSU-1 sound or changing SD card type etc.

 

I've read that save states are technically possible but it may take someone like RedGuy or some other adventurous soul to work on it. I'd like to see a GUI for cheats before that.

 

One limitation that looks like it could remain with SA-1 support is that it won't be possible to have the SA-1 and MSU-1 swapped in at the same time (I assume that is what is what is meant by "not enough room".), Maybe a new revised cart address that, but I am not sure if I care.

[cacophony]

My understanding has been that the basic hardware for the SD2SNES has been finalized (that is what Ikari has said) aside from revisions that improve MSU-1 sound or changing SD card type etc

 

That's correct. It sounds like the major redesign will be called something entirely different.

[Tanooki]

Yeah but so far what I read that re-design isn't going to do a whole lot but fluff. Save/Load states properly done having more room on a larger storage capacity FPGA. The existing one seems capable of pulling off what the SNES requests from various chips, so it's not like people with the SD2SNES will feel left in the dark with a new buy.

 

Speaking of, despite the ebay tools saying a mail delivery of Monday, the USPS shows it's already in town so I got mine coming tomorrow, the previous release with the software fix while G had the installed amp hardware fix for MSU-1 which I doubt I'll ever bother with anyway. I can't wait. Just trying to decide if I tweak the smokemonster 6 bundle and pick up the so called unsupported games and stuff them individually into their folders or just leave it for ease of access.

[cacophony]

Well a beefier fpga means the ability to have more features going forward. Save states alone would be huge IMO. Having the ability to do MSU1 audio in combination with SA-1 would also be possible. And there's all the stuff we haven't even thought of yet. I wouldn't call any of that fluff.

[Pixelboy]

Well a beefier fpga means the ability to have more features going forward. Save states alone would be huge IMO. Having the ability to do MSU1 audio in combination with SA-1 would also be possible. And there's all the stuff we haven't even thought of yet. I wouldn't call any of that fluff.

Where a "beefier FPGA" is concerned, my thoughts tend to go towards a general-purpose cartridge-based machine. Imagine a console (or perhaps even a tabletop-style machine with its own little screen) that would accept cartridges that would contain the ROM (or ROM set) of a game, together with a custom FPGA core that provides everything needed to run that game on the console. Then you could have actual arcade games on cartridges, Neo-Geo style. I think that would be a really cool product, with licensed arcade games, and perhaps other games like maybe Sega 32X games, if possible with a big enough FPGA setup inside the console. Putting the FPGA core inside the cart would represent a definite step forward.

[cybercylon]

I think for quite awhile, my checkbook is going to call any redesign "fluff"

 

If SA-1 turns out to be mostly working with the current design, good enough is good enough for now.