I was reading about the Gameduino and thought that this Arduino / FPGA could make a good GPU / co-processor for the 6502 or 65C816S. I keep seeing many projects that could work well in re-establishing the 65XXX series. If people aren't interested, I'll probably stop posting but if you are interested, I could imagine a new generation of 8 and 16 bit computers.

http://dangerousprototypes.com/2011/02/ ... ntrollers/



http://excamera.com/sphinx/gameduino/

http://excamera.com/sphinx/gameduino/making.html

Keep posting, definitely interested. Was looking at a different AVR based game system but it being under a creative commons nixed any form of commercial usage for that application. What is the licensing on the Gameduino?

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"My biggest dream in life? Building black plywood Habitrails"

I received an email answering your question:



You might want to watch the video here to convince you:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/208 ... me-adapter

That's a nice addition to a 6502. It has an impressive performance.

/rant on/ Yet, it's frustating to see that newer chips get more and more performance, while the 6502 (or even 65816) just stays where it is... Personally a system with a 6502 and a "coprocessor" which has many times the performance of the 6502 "just" to handle USB or graphics or ethernet or whatever to me feels kind of tainted. Time to speed up the 6502... But that is a topic for another thread.. /rant off/

So, yes, keep posting, always looking for interesting stuff!

André

Argh. I need a new version of Eagle to open the schematics and board files... Is it really that long ago that I bought my copy? time to upgrade...

I think Eagle has a free version for small and non-commercial boards that you can download.

What I learned from the comment section of the project (and I don't want to mislead anyone) is that there isn't a processing interface for this product yet but it seems quite doable according to the maker. I also have a link for a more powerful FPGA.

w-w-w-wait, tis also under gpl? OHBOY.

Reason being: am looking beyond hobbyist usage for doing some redemption arcade games. This would mean a for profit model that GPL and Creative Commons does not support, which means I cannot use the Gameduino for sale projects.

blah


As an aside, that is also why for my Pinball Mind -project, I am developing it all from scratch. the SDK has a special license which isnt a creative commons one that allows game program and hardware upgrades to be sold for profit.

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"My biggest dream in life? Building black plywood Habitrails"

Yes, I know. I just downloaded it. And I found that VQFP seems to have 0.5mm pin distance, while TQFP has 0.3mm pin distance? I am not sure I got something wrong here with the TQFP? I was wondering why they used a VQFP package. Considering I managed to get my TQFP100 for the ethernet chip working (ok, after 4 attempts...) I might even try a spartan myself...

André

Well, you cannot use the sample code - but the verilog and even board design are under BSD, which, as far as I understand allow commercial use without having to open up your own work. But I am not a lawyer.

Would you consider for example a CPU core under LGPL (so that you can link it to your own non-public code, and only have to give back/open up any changes to that CPU core, but not your code) also out of the question?

I am asking because I am thinking about what license I would be using for my 65k (of which there still is no code yet though)

André

I was considering a hardware 816 attached to the FPGA which would have the graphics drivers. But if the FPGA can handle the graphics and CPU cores together, I am good for that.

But yup, I am good for using an open core that allows me commercial on a license fee. No issue there for paying for your work being a part of it.

The part of GPL and creative commons that chilled me was in being unable to use the core Verilog or driver code in a product to be sold.

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"My biggest dream in life? Building black plywood Habitrails"

Wow, that thing looks amazing. A good project for the 6502 programmable logic guys here could be to take this, replace the SPI interface with a parallel one so it's indistinguishable from a slow 62256, and make a little PCB with a wide DIP footprint that exposes all the SRAM emulation lines plus the digital VGA and audio outputs ready to be sent to ladder network DACs. I bet that would be popular with a lot of folks working with the different types of older 8 and 16 bit CPUs that don't have built-in SPI.

I would hope you would share your idea with me. This is what I have on the project:

http://www.xess.com/prods/prod048.php

This is an FPGA that is like the one in the Gameduino but may be the same one or more powerful. Notice it has a PIC 18F14K50 in it. The cost of the unit is $69 which raises the cost of what people can pay.

I have a lot to learn to get from here to there.

Hang on a sec: neither GPL nor some of the versions of CC cause any problem with for-profit work. Admittedly, some versions of CC do forbid for-profit use - so it's important that you know which version you're dealing with. The important thing about the GPL is that it mandates that the source code must remain 'free' - there's no problem with charging money.

For a project with a single copyright holder - a single contributor - it's easy to change licenses, so I recommend starting with GPL or LGPL - you can always downgrade to BSD or MIT later if you need to. The problem with MIT and BSD is that someone can make fixes and improvements, publish the binaries, and keep the source code improvements to themselves.

@ChuckT

Unfortunately I know very little about FPGAs myself. I took a course on PLDs years ago and learnt ABEL, and that's about the extent of it. I put the idea out there since it seems to be in the general direction that Daryl and his 65xx hardware consortium are looking at, and there's a real need for it. Assuming that the Gameduino has been written in a modular way and is not a pile of spaghetti code, it should be relatively easy for someone who knows the language to replace the VHDL functions that implement SPI with ones that simulate an SRAM chip (my first thought was to give it a 65xx bus with phi2, R/W etc, but this makes it usable by other CPUs as well, making it more marketable if they decide it's something they'd like to sell)