Thursday, August 26, 2010

And so it begins...

..the Great Garage Cleanout of 2010 that is.

Well, I have to make room, so the arcade games are starting to go.  Gremlin "Comotion" and Midway "Extra Bases" were parted out today.  The dead husks are sitting out at the curb as I type.  I kept the PCB's and took some last photos which I'll add a little later.

These were both used to develop the MAME drivers.  I created "blockade.c" based on Comotion and some schematics from Al Kossow.  The Midway "Extra Bases" cocktail contained a Black and White monitor, which was interesting because the game at that time was in color in MAME.  It turns out that the game had a dip switch, which could either drive a Black and White monitor directly with the Luminance output, or in another configuration, drive the color conversion board and play the game in color.  This was sort of "unknown" or at least not well known at the time in the MAME circles.

Ironically, as I pulled the monitor out of the "Extra Bases", I noticed it had some burn-in from "Blockade", which is basically the same hardware as "Comotion".  (Obviously not the original monitor)

These two games were bought from two different places, but being of similar vintage I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

Fun with FPGAs - recreating the Atari TIA, Part 1

I have been playing with recreating the Atari TIA chip as used in the original 2600 in an FPGA.  I know this has been done a few times alrea...