A new snowboard, a broken wrist and a hard drive crash later…
Thanks for hanging in there. The last couple of days I’ve been working pretty hard on the project in my spare time. I have the first board revision 95% done and tonight or tomorrow I should have it ready to send out to the fab house. I have decided a few things about the design:
- I will go with a “bare pcb” design that does not fit inside a VB donor cartridge. In the future people may want to make their own cases for the PCB but for now it’s simply too much effort for not much gain. I think this is a good solution because now we won’t have to keep using VB donor carts and sacrificing the already-decreasing number of VB carts out there.
- The VB connector issue has been 100% solved and I have several suppliers in line for the 2mm-pitch headers. The only downside is the cost, because each header comes in at just over $7, which is very expensive for a header. The thickness of the board is such that it makes header installs extremely easy, even for novice solderers. See this picture for how the board will fit in the VB:
- I fixed all package sizes for the SRAM and bus transceiver chips, which is why my first prototype failed. Now I just have to fix a few traces on the board and it’s essentially ready for Rev 0.1.
- On the software side I think I have some solid code in place but there are still some questions in the air about how to alert the VB when a new game has been loaded into SRAM. I will investigate these issues once the hardware has been validated and I can focus 100% on software.
- I am toying with the idea of using a MicroSD-based bootloader on the microprocessor. That is, upgrading the firmware would be as simple as downloading a special firmware file and dropping it onto the MicroSD card. This will allow me to fix bugs for people who already have a cartridge.
- I haven’t set up the VB dev environment on my new hard drive yet so I haven’t done any of the VB program development yet.
That’s it for now. More updates to come, hopefully more regularly now (once a week or more).
Looking good:D keep up the amazing work;)
Hello I just found this I really hope it is still going. Would be awesome to choose any game via a menu system.
That’s the plan, however I’m not sure if it will end up that way. I haven’t given up on the project yet but I’m in disarray right now while I’m moving so there is no timetable for this project.
Just another random here, throwing you words of encouragement. Stumbled upon this ages ago, and knew that I needed one probably no matter what price you name in the end
Awesome work, hope you manage to see it through to the end.
Thanks. Unfortunately this development cycle is taking way longer than I originally thought. I’m trying to keep the board down at 2 layers because of the prototyping cost, but 2 layer boards are proving to be difficult. I have a lot of high-speed buses on this board and it seems to be having EMC issues. I haven’t given up yet but if you’re looking to get this anytime soon I would probably suggest getting a flashboy.