I went ahead and registered my vote, after waiting a bit. My favorite would be a combination of a standard MCU/DSP like PIC18 or dsPIC and a simple/cheap programmable logic setup. But I would have to weight it against 'advanced discrete logic', because the way I'd do the logic would probably be in a way that would not be easily reprogrammable by everybody (unless, maybe the MCU could handle it, getting kinda heavy on development time though..). So I'm thinking advanced discrete logic + cheap DSP is probably the winner.
Short of putting some kind of heavy CPLD/light FPGA and loading up on FlashROM, I have a hard time coming up with something I'd like more than Squeedo though.
I'm also trying my damnedest to come up with sufficiently hardcore designs that I can actually build by myself. Avoiding fine-pitched stuff, TSOP packages, is actually annoyingly limiting. Because I don't mind working for pretty cheap, but if I have to pay someone else even if they work cheap too, there's the whole paying for everything up-front deal.
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tokumaru wrote:
This question is a tough one. I'm a fan of discrete logic, but I miss scanline/cycle counters.
This is perfectly doable with discrete logic (74HC161 counter). You'll probably have to pair two 74HC161 counters in order to get a decent 8-bit counter.
Or a cheap ($1) MCU. Lots of them have a clock input for a counter (with pre-scaling too).
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In a perfect world, I would shoot for a handful of features from the J.Y. Company mapper (especially the special IRQ modes and the direct-from-ROM nametables). An integer multiplier would be nice, and so would some sort of hardware RNG.
I think that's all doable with an MCU/DSP pretty much. Except the ROM nametables.
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Programmable logic can be programmed with a JTAG.
Bad thing with that though is that it's more cost, more cables to buy/build. Sure, someone could just get a proconfigured one, but if other people started developing stuff with custom logic, it'd make the non-JTAG one look kinda crippled..