The term “Cart” being used in a very loose sense 😉 .
I mentioned in another thread that I had been working on a pretty cool project. I had a little bit of spare time this weekend, so I pulled it back off the shelf, took a pic, and started looking at the code again.
So… here it is. It’s a Xilinx Spartan 3E FPGA dev board, hooked to the VB cart connector. Basically, upon power up, it loads the FPGA, then boots a small application (just to verify that it’s running)… as well as maps 8MBytes of RAM to the ROM area, 8MBytes of RAM to the Expansion area (imagine >8 MBytes of WRAM 🙂 ), and 64Kbit Save RAM. It has an SD card slot, but I haven’t written the firmware to communicate to it yet. It also has 16MBytes of Flash, but I’m not planning on using it, as there’s plenty of RAM, and that’s much faster to load.
The plan is to write a bootloader, which loads a menu from the SD card, and then allows you to load the ROM and save games from the SD card (as well as save the last save game to the SD). Of course, for homebrew, things like the extra expansion RAM, access to the SD card, etc. would be great features… as well as anything else I’d cram into the FPGA. It also has a USB interface, which would be REALLY great for debugging and development, as well as something like the Virtual-E project (using the VB as a 3D display).
I built this last year when I planned on using it for a class project for grad school, but then the project requirements changed, and I ended up doing something completely unrelated. The plan was to make a hardware accelerator for the VB, involving a polygon engine and/or audio effects engine (similar to a Super FX chip). I’d still like to do it, but being a project for school would have been great motivation to get it done.
While I think the features I want could be shrunk to fit inside a VB cart, it’d probably be a difficult design/assembly, and quite expensive. So… don’t expect to see this in final form for sale any time soon 😉 . Just figured I’d share anyway though.
DogP
