Famicom NES repro clone

Discuss hardware-related topics, such as development cartridges, CopyNES, PowerPak, EPROMs, or whatever.

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Sumez
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Re: Famicom NES repro clone

Post by Sumez »

Pokun wrote: Maybe an FPGA is a better choice though. Only problem with the current FPGA solutions is that they are closed source so they don't really contribute to the preservation very much.
What would you do other than an FPGA solution? Have a factory produce the chips as-is?
I think having two FPGAs on the board is ideal. Create the open source clones for the FPGA (I thought this was the idea from the get-go?), and store the data on flash chips on the board. So you'd have a button to change the console into either PAL or NTSC mode, which would load the relevant programs into each FPGA chip, allowing you to boot the console as either. To my knowledge, FPGAs can be reprogrammed as much as you like with no issues?

I don't know anything about hardware, so I'm sorry if what I just said is complete hogwash, but I believe similar hardware solutions are pretty common out there. And it's not like you'd need two separate PPUs running simultaneously.
tepples
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Re: Famicom NES repro clone

Post by tepples »

The problem is that currently, the FPGA famiclones' logic is proprietary, and it also requires a proprietary compiler to translate Verilog source code into something the FPGA can execute.
Pokun
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Re: Famicom NES repro clone

Post by Pokun »

The OP is just making the Famicom HVC-CPU-05 board and tries to fit it with new parts wherever possible. For custom chips like the CPU you will have to take them from a broken Famicom or NES, or possibly use clone chips (if they are pin-compatible, I don't know).

But yeah if you want to make a fully reproduced Famicom I guess FPGA is the only choice for the custom parts, and yeah it should be possible to reprogram it with different chips' logic.
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Sumez
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Re: Famicom NES repro clone

Post by Sumez »

Pokun wrote:The OP is just making the Famicom HVC-CPU-05 board and tries to fit it with new parts wherever possible. For custom chips like the CPU you will have to take them from a broken Famicom or NES, or possibly use clone chips (if they are pin-compatible, I don't know).
Oh, I thought the concept here was cloning the NES using new open source components, for the sake of preservation. This just sounds like a hobbyist mod project.
zzo38
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Re: Famicom NES repro clone

Post by zzo38 »

tepples wrote:...requires a proprietary compiler to translate Verilog source code into something the FPGA can execute.
This is not the case with iCE40 FPGAs, although I don't know if the number of gates and the voltage and so on is suitable.
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Fisher
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Re: Famicom NES repro clone

Post by Fisher »

I think some FPGA NES clones like this one already exists.
I think that someone who have good knowledge about VHDL can take a look on it's code and use parts of it to build whatever NES funcion block is wanted, or even port to other platforms.
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