> I was thinking about the possibility of building a miniature C-64... you
> could probably squeeze the whole thing into an FPGA, but the VIC II and SID
> chips might be a problem. It'd probably be easier to use an off the shelf
> embedded controler and adapt the VICE emulator. A 2 or 3 inch color LCD
> would make a nice monitor, but fabricating the miniature keyboard could be
> difficult. You could always use a cheap membrane-style keyboard, I guess.
> How about a 1541 disk drive that takes smartmedia cards?
VIC-II and SID are perpetually problematic, especially SID since it's part
analogue (and probably so is VIC, for that matter). The timings are well known
but the interactions between registers are sometimes unpredictable (but rest
assured out there is a game that depends on that particular interaction).
Emulator writers have torn their hair out for years thanks to Commodore's
loose hardware design philosophy.
You would need a very large and complex FPGA to fully emulate the range of
behaviours these remarkable (and bizarre) chips demonstrate.
--
----------------------------- personal page: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ --
Cameron Kaiser, Point Loma Nazarene University * ckaiser_at_stockholm.ptloma.edu
-- I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous. ----------------------------------
Received on Fri Dec 15 2000 - 14:53:48 GMT