When I started to search for the the first challenge was the decision where to begin with. Looking at the , there are not many landmarks that provide clear guidance. The ROMs are quite prominent due to their regular structure, but they don't have a direct relationship to the random generator. Furthermore, the purpose of two of the three...

We need to set the stage first for this post. The is built from . This means there are basically two types of devices: Enhancement-mode NMOS transistors for shorting a node to GND (or forwarding voltage between two nodes) Depletion-mode NMOS transistors to act as pull-ups to VDD In addition, there are a total of three layers to connect devices in decreasing...

The introduced a tracing procedure to extract logic gates from VLM5030's layout information. This post shows how the procedure can be extended to extract VLM5030's embedded ROMs. The image below shows a portion of the sequencer ROM: The blue metal bar is GND The horizontal red metal bar is bitline 0 (out of 37) The vertical orange polysilicon wires represent a total of...

Quite a couple of Konami cores use the chip to generate human-like speech for in-game effects. While the replacement design created for the replay library does its job, it still falls behind the audio of an original chip. This is mainly due to the fact that the design was built based on without detailed information of the chip's...

There has been quite a lot of work going on in the background with the FPGA Arcade project, not the least of which is a host of new core releases. As you may have guessed from the image, the NES is now available for the Replay and MKR Vidor4000 platforms. This version of the NES core includes a transistor net-list based...

Well, more time has passed. I had surgery on my jaw a few weeks ago in an attempt to remove part of a wisdom tooth that was left behind a few years ago. I'm in recovery, but it really knocked me out for a bit. We are making good progress on both the DE10-nano support and Replay2 - more info shortly. I...

I think many people agree that retro hardware looks best on CRTs from the same period. The downside is CRTs are expensive, bulky and hard to get hold of now. I've got a small Sony PVM I use for testing, and a large Sony broadcast monitor that is most often used as a coffee table to be honest. Modern screens have...

Sorry it's been a bit quiet here for the last few months. I had to move flat three times since January and all the retro kit has been in storage. Work has been intense and it's only the last week or two that life is calming down enough to get the Retro stuff back on track. The initial plan was to...