Building Consoles For Fun

tierra writes "Indiviuals writing their own games is one thing, but try building your own console. Russ Christensen, and his team put together in class, dive into the fun of using an old Nintendo system to house their customized XSA-50 Board. They also uses a XSA Extender to hook their personal console up to a monitor instead of a TV. They programmed Tetris and Space Invaders for their console using a system they call CASM."

Comments

Re:I'm waiting for someone to build a homebrew X-B

[Jace of Fuse!]

From what I've read, the X-box is nothing more than a PIII PC with some mods to make it "different".

Some very serious mods to make it different. For starters, it has little to no OS overhead, it's memory structure is unified and more efficient than a PC's and it doesn't waste memory managing memory since all of it's ram is dedicated to the single application (game) that is running.

If this has already been done, please post links.

Just do a search for XBox emulation. It hasn't been done, and the primary reason is that the XBox game discs are written in reverse order from regular DVDs. This gives the advantage of speeding up read access because the data is read from the outside in, but also it prevents piracy.

There are a whole slew of other reasons why the XBos isn't just a PC, and why a PC can't really just magically be turned into an Xbox without some serious software trickery. I once thought it would be possible, but after looking into it I realized it's going to be a little harder than anybody initially thought. ...

Now -- what I -- WOULD -- love to see is a project very closely resembling the Indreama, put together by someone who really knows a whole lot about video game consoles, and willing to take a risk on a different business model than has traditionally been used by the video game industry.

Hmm. Maybe I should post my ideas in my journal....

Re:Too Much Code

[Russ Christensen]

To respond to why it took 9000 lines of VHDL code. One of our key design goals was to have this run on hardware. VHDL is a very complicated language that is very powerful, and then comes the part of VHDL that is an IEEE standard for going to hardware. That part of VHDL is only the simple features and so that was our reason for only using the very simple features of VHDL. We wanted to know for sure that the design would be able to drop down onto an FPGA. We didn't want a processor that would only work in simulation or would only compile down with one tool.

This wasn't a project to show off that we know how to program VHDL in a fancy way. Rather it was to show that we can quickly design a computer. This was the first time that we had used VHDL and when we started the project we did not have the FPGA's to test our design on. So we decided that we would only use the simplest subset of VHDL. Our goal was to go from nothing to a finished project in two months. We viewed using complex VHDL features that might not compile to hardware.

We succeded in getting the project done in two months as a part-time school project. Including hardware design. A complete test framework, two games, and a final report. I think when you say "The entire project was just poorly thought though" you are not judging the project according to our design goals.