[HN Gopher] I built my own Sega Genesis (Mega Drive) hardware de... ___________________________________________________________________ I built my own Sega Genesis (Mega Drive) hardware dev kit from scratch Author : regus Score : 145 points Date : 2022-01-21 17:35 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (nestenius.se) (TXT) w3m dump (nestenius.se) | rightbyte wrote: | Heh ... ut: *wait for datapacket to | be stored att $FF0000 lea $ff0000,a5 | | I like how he slips in three Swedish spelling "friend words" | there. | | For some reason I have always found a relief in programming and | mixing in my native tongue randomly. Like, it gives a playlike | non tryhard touch to it. And the flow is nicer. | tndata wrote: | Author here, never anticipated 30 years ago that someone else | would actually look at the code :-) | rahen wrote: | It's great to see some new projects being wire wrapped. It's | becoming some kind of lost art nowadays. | tndata wrote: | Author here, wire-wrapping is like therapy for your mind! like | solving a sudoku! | klodolph wrote: | Fantastic stuff! | | There are plenty of modern flashcarts around for various systems, | but most of them are designed to let you load up a bunch of | (often pirated) games onto an SD card and play them, and they're | not very good for development. Nobody wants to build their ROM | image, copy it to an SD card, swap SD cards around, and then | reboot the system. (Plenty of people _do_ that, it just sucks.) | | It goes to show that making your own cartridge for development is | not as hard as you might expect. | | There are some high-end cartridges out there that let you do | everything, with both SD cards and USB ports, but it's less | common to see pure development cartridges, which could be made | much more cheaply. | fit2rule wrote: | codazoda wrote: | I never really dared to dig into electronics like this. I had a | nack for breaking things when I did. | | As an example, I purchased a Pentium machine back in the day. I | had a feeling it was running too hot (or maybe I was trying to | over-clock, I don't recall). But I decided to build a simple PCI | card. So simple, in fact, that it just had a 12v case fan on it. | I wired up the +12v pin and the ground pin to the 12v +/- of the | fan. Then I plugged the PCI board into the PC. It worked! Except, | it was now the only thing in the PC that worked. | | After removing it, the machine no longer worked. I returned it to | the shop I purchased it from and they informed me that I must | have had a surge. Everything was destroyed. The CPU, the RAM, the | Video card, it was all gone. | tndata wrote: | The Sega Mega drive was a very robust machine and it did | survive numerous short-circuits over the years and even today | it still works!. but yes, I have blown numerous PC-motherboards | over the years though... I guess that comes with the trade! One | time I damaged my motherboard that was powered-off by using the | vacuum cleaner to get rid of the dusts from one of the fans. | The spinning of the fan resulted in a power-surge that damaged | my motherboard :-( | poyu wrote: | If you want to get into digital electronics and computer | building, here is a really good series on building your own | 8-bit computer. | | https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLowKtXNTBypGqImE405J2... | londondev45 wrote: | A message of appreciation, you sound very cool. I'd love to have | seen this when I was a young sega mega drive obsessive | tndata wrote: | Original blog post author here! Thanks for the kind words! | InvaderFizz wrote: | One point I didn't see in the article. How complete was your | dev kit? Could it actually run commercial games? | tndata wrote: | Yes, I could run games and I also wrote some simpler demos | where I for example could move a player around the screen | using the joystick. So, it was fully functional. | nsxwolf wrote: | What's the sponge for? | tndata wrote: | Blog post author here. I used it just to reduce the stress on | the vertical circuit board. | jdmoreira wrote: | I feel like this would be an inferior development experience in | 2022 compared to this approach: | https://hackaday.io/project/1507-usb-megadrive-devkit | | Which is an fpga in the cartridge that also serves as a gdb stub | over serial. You can debug with gdb directly on the hardware. | tndata wrote: | Original author here, wow! What a cool project! | [deleted] | Nexxxeh wrote: | Really cool read. Am I right in thinking it works like a flash | cart, but with volatile memory? | tndata wrote: | Author of the blog post here. Yes, I basically emulated the | cartridge rom using static memory. That was the simplest at the | time. | hnthrowaway0315 wrote: | Laughing out loud, cheering and clapping my hands when seeing | lines such as "As I was on a very tight budget, I decided to | build my own. How hard could that be?". | | I wish I had that intuition and courage to build my own | birdfeeder back in the day. And of course the author managed to | do much cooler things. | tndata wrote: | Original blog post author here! Thanks! :-) Perhaps its not to | late to build that bird feeder :-) | hnthrowaway0315 wrote: | Thanks man! Definitely working on that direction. Do you have | other contemporary projects to show? I'm going to browse | through your blog this weekend :D | tndata wrote: | There are a few other projects I did listed here | https://nestenius.se/about/ Besides that, my biggest | project so far is that I created a developer community | around 1996 called Programmers Heaven that became my main | living for many years :-) | tsmarsh wrote: | I bought Ben Eater's Motorola kit and was overwhelmed, I have a | whole new respect for folks that can do this. | tndata wrote: | Author of the blog post here. Thanks, it was a quite long | project, but the device have a pretty simple and plain | architecture that made it easy. Todays consoles are much harder | to hack, due to multiple layers of encryption and protection. | jbluepolarbear wrote: | I had to build an rtos (real-time operating system) for the | m68k and dealing with how m68k stack pointers work with | interrupts was really frustrating. | bluedino wrote: | I would love to read this kind of article along with all the | drawings and pictures of a similar kit for the NES, from the | 1980's | | A lot of those early programmers knew electronics they just built | their own stuff. Crazy compared to your average developer now. A | lot of guys had to build their own terminals/keyboard etc back | then (especially the 70's computer clubs). At some point the | hardware and software kind of split up (lucky for us that didn't | have any real hardware knowledge) | tndata wrote: | Tinkering with hardware back then was much easier because the | frequency of the devices was pretty low (like 1-8 MHz) and the | interfaces and system bus was much easier to work with compared | to todays advanced protocols like (USB, etherhet...) | hnthrowaway0315 wrote: | Yup, I guess we can still do it today, for ourselves and for | our kids, with the right tools. I'm thinking maybe it is not a | huge amount of effort to build your own hardware back in the | day because so may people did that. At least they had kits too | back in the day. | djmips wrote: | This is pretty similar to hardware made by Radical Software and | Accolade for professional development back in the day. Also the | EA dev hardware was similar but more advanced since it contained | additional hardware for capturing the bus like a logic analyzer | might. For the Accolade version it was very similar to this | design. I worked on the debugger and it was a lot of fun. At the | time we used the Lattice C compiler and I supported C source | level debugging including watches that could use a C like parser. | kingcharles wrote: | Contemporary with the console, the two kits I had for development | were SN System's PsyQ, and the one you could buy at a decently | stocked video games store was the Super Magic Drive which used | floppies. | | https://twitter.com/bigevilboss/status/1142031487317020672 | | https://segaretro.org/Super_Magic_Drive | tndata wrote: | Wow! Nice hardware! ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-01-21 23:00 UTC)