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UnoCart-2600 : a DIY SD multi-cart for the 2600


electrotrains

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Thanks! But the menu is flickering though, its just my TV + camera does a good job of masking it.

Too bad, I was hoping for a possible improvement of the Harmony menu. icon_smile.gif

 

Joystick up/down moves up and down, left/right pages forwards and back, and of course you can use directories to help arrange things.

Yup, that's the bare minimum.

 

But you should consider other controllers or at least allow navigating the menu with the joystick in both ports. And since ROM file names tend to be quite long, IMO you should also think about a way to display the whole filename.

 

Maybe have a look at the Harmony menu and code. And please let me know if you need help there.

 

I love your conversion of Thrust by the way, it is probably my favorite title I played while testing the cart and I'm definitely planning to return to it - I'm sure it is way better than either the ZX Spectrum or Atari 8-bit versions from back in the day.

Thanks a lot! People either love or hate the game. icon_smile.gif

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Just a quick update on the project - after about a week of frustration and bad noises, I got DPC working and Pitfall II now seems to play fine, along with reasonable sounding music. So the cartridge now plays 100% of the 2600's classic library (well, at least until someone testing tells me otherwise).

 

Latest firmware and sources are on github.

 

Robin

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Very cool project. Do you plan to release the PCB design files soon? I'm not wanting to resell, just like to build one for myself. :)

 

I haven't released the PCB files yet since I had wanted to produce some carts myself, to recoup my development costs. Although I'm doing this for fun as a hobby project, it's nice to at least cover my costs, or even better - earn a bit of money to sink into my next hardware project :).

 

You can build the project yourself right now, with a ST32F407 Discovery board. I'm going to get some more PCBs made once I hear back from the various people that I've sent carts to for testing. I'll post here when they arrive, so get in touch then if you want a bare PCB or a built board?

 

Robin

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I haven't released the PCB files yet since I had wanted to produce some carts myself, to recoup my development costs. Although I'm doing this for fun as a hobby project, it's nice to at least cover my costs, or even better - earn a bit of money to sink into my next hardware project :).

 

You can build the project yourself right now, with a ST32F407 Discovery board. I'm going to get some more PCBs made once I hear back from the various people that I've sent carts to for testing. I'll post here when they arrive, so get in touch then if you want a bare PCB or a built board?

 

Robin

 

100% agree with you. That's how I handle a lot of my projects. The discovery board is too clumsy for me. So I'll wait. I don't mind PCB assembly etc. Great project BTW.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hi all,

 

Is there anybody in the UK willing to lend me an Atari 7800 console?

I'm happy to cover postage costs both ways, and I wouldn't need it for long.

 

It would be nice to get the UnoCart-2600 working on the 7800 and I'm not really willing to spend the prices I'm seeing on ebay.

 

Robin

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Hi all,

 

Is there anybody in the UK willing to lend me an Atari 7800 console?

I'm happy to cover postage costs both ways, and I wouldn't need it for long.

 

It would be nice to get the UnoCart-2600 working on the 7800 and I'm not really willing to spend the prices I'm seeing on ebay.

 

Robin

 

I would suspect how you're reading the values from the address bus. The JRs and 7800s are notorious for throwing the wrong value on the address bus in between cycles. A12 seems to be the biggest offender. On my JR A12 will always go low for a small portion of each cycle even when transitioning from two locations that both have A12 high. I work around this by predicting the next address value in the Strong-ARM driver but that probably wouldn't work with regular bank switch schemes. Instead you may need to introduce a delay between when the address bus starts changing and when you read it or just read it multiple times and throw out any transient values.

 

Too bad I didn't take you up on your offer for a PCB. I have a 7800, JR and logic analyzer already set up for exactly this type of issue.

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I would suspect how you're reading the values from the address bus. The JRs and 7800s are notorious for throwing the wrong value on the address bus in between cycles. A12 seems to be the biggest offender. On my JR A12 will always go low for a small portion of each cycle even when transitioning from two locations that both have A12 high. I work around this by predicting the next address value in the Strong-ARM driver but that probably wouldn't work with regular bank switch schemes. Instead you may need to introduce a delay between when the address bus starts changing and when you read it or just read it multiple times and throw out any transient values.

 

Too bad I didn't take you up on your offer for a PCB. I have a 7800, JR and logic analyzer already set up for exactly this type of issue.

 

Hopefully I'll get it working - someone has kindly offered to lend me a 7800, so I should be able to get to the bottom of it.

 

I sent a couple of test firmwares to someone in the USA with a 7800 and managed to get normal and bankswitching catridges working without any problems. So electrically things seem to be fine, and the basic cartridge emulation routines are also fine. It just seems to be the menu that is causing problems - the 7800 boots to straight to the built-in Asteroids. I suspect the 7800 BIOS is interacting with the cartridge<->MCU comms, but it wasn't quite as straightforward to debug as I was expecting....

 

Robin

Edited by electrotrains
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  • 3 weeks later...

It's been a while so time for an update on this project!

 

There is now a new firmware version available on the github page, which adds Atari 7800 compatibility and Arcadia/Starpath Supercharger support. With these changes, the cartridge will now play all the classic 2600 games.

 

The 7800 fixes are thanks to InactiveX, who lent me a PAL 7800 for the last few days, and MacRorie, who tested it on an NTSC 7800.

DirtyHairy has added the Arcadia/Starpath Supercharger support with up to 256 loads (2MB ROM files!).

The source code and new manual are both also on the github page.

 

 

I also built 10 cartridges using ENIG (gold) pcbs a couple of weeks ago, but hadn't announced it yet since I was waiting to be able to program them with the new version of the firmware. Most of them are already spoken for, but there's a couple left if anybody wants one.

The price will be £25 + P&P (£4 USA/Europe, £2 UK).

 

post-41252-0-77220000-1522577293_thumb.jpg

 

If you'd like one of the spare carts, let me know here. First come first served. (Though if enough people are interested, I will probably make another batch).

 

Robin

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  • 3 weeks later...

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