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First post: Welcome to the Uzebox forums!

Posted: Mon Aug 25, 2008 3:47 am
by uze6666
Welcome to the Uzebox project forums. This place is dedicated to all you electronics freaks and hackers outhere. The Uzebox is the result of more than 3 years of hacking on my spare time, so I hope its useful to you! The uttermost goal of the project was to design some reusable kernel of common video and audio functions that, amongst other, shows the sheer power of the Atmel architecture. So feel free to contribute hardware or software modifications, everything will be published on the site for others to benefit!

-Uze

Re: First post!

Posted: Mon Aug 25, 2008 6:23 pm
by ThunderZ
Really thanks.
Only one things to say, I love you ;)
Really really thanks man.

Re: First post!

Posted: Mon Aug 25, 2008 10:37 pm
by ekros
Hello!

I discovered this project a few days ago... It's really amazing!
I thought that designing a game console (even a simple one) was very difficult, but you've demonstrated that I was wrong!

I'm going to build the hardware as soon I get the components!!!

Thank you from Spain!!

Re: First post!

Posted: Mon Aug 25, 2008 10:41 pm
by antibyte
Hi UZE,

great work. Looks awesome.
I will build this one for sure. :D

Greetz
antibyte

Re: First post!

Posted: Tue Aug 26, 2008 4:24 am
by aphixe
yea I found this today, I supprised at what it can do. I wish there was an irc channel or something we could go to for perhaps a quicker means of knowledge. I seems that this box is quite new so.. I'm hoping for a sticky on more info on where to get the stuff.. I heard digi-key. but I think for me, it may be too hard to put together. perhaps if I had more elect. knowledge, even tho I learned some in school. I cant really read a schematic. I know which symbol is for resistors and stuff, I guess I'm a newbie. ahah.. I assume this is only the beginning of this project. I did look at the price list and stuff. but links would help. I saw some for the nes controler part and some PROGRAMMER AVR IN SYSTEM. whatever that is. looks like a way to flash the memory chip? well hope i didnt ramble too much..

Re: First post!

Posted: Tue Aug 26, 2008 4:48 pm
by Dosenpfand
Hey!
I had a short look at the uzebox project and it seems to be great! please keep up the nice work!
I will have a look if i can contribute something.
Thanks so far
Dosenpfand

Great project !

Posted: Sun Sep 28, 2008 5:53 pm
by Eddy-B
I gotta tell you: this project worked out fine. Great job!

I've come a long way myself in just a couple months (check my Console 32 project.
I didn't want to overclock my AVR as it will definately shorten its lifespan at such high speeds, so i was stuck with just 16 colors at 16MHz system clock, while your uzebox runs almost 50% faster than its rated maximum.

Anyway: great project - hope mine will be appreciated as well, and i will check yours out as well :)

Re: Great project !

Posted: Sun Sep 28, 2008 8:25 pm
by havok1919
Eddy-B wrote:I didn't want to overclock my AVR as it will definately shorten its lifespan at such high speeds, so i was stuck with just 16 colors at 16MHz system clock, while your uzebox runs almost 50% faster than its rated maximum.
So I'm really not trying to just diagree with every post you make. It just worked out that way (and there were only two so far!). :lol:

I don't think we'll have any negative impact on part life overclocking it. I would agree with you if we had to raise the power rail up to get better slew rates and run reliably but we actually seem to handle ~28.63MHz just fine even at 3.3V. We don't have any excessive over/undershoots or ringing, so I would wager a guess as to say we'll have a longer life span at 3.3V/28.6MHz than someone else would at 20MHz and 5V. (less heat/power/part stress)

I also suspect that the Mega644 (and almost certainly the 1284) will be using processes very, very similar to (if not identical to) the Xmega's. Having worked for a semiconductor company in the past it would not surprise me in the least to one day find out that they simply won't rate the new Mega AVRs higher than 20MHz because they dont want to crowd in on the 32MHz rating for the XMegas. (Xmega = more profit margin per die area)

Back in the day we built CPU accelerators for the Amiga. We ran Motorola 68HC000-16's at 40MHz in engineering all the time. Being engineers and always liking "safe" we ended up dialing it back to 28MHz. I have no doubt Atmel does the same-- especially when you consider the full operating envelope of the part (temp range, etc) that an Uzebox would likely never encounter.

Pretty much all the semi guys do that-- a part comes out, they rate if for a particular speed, then once they get more qualifiying time in the same part, same process suddenly gets a "speed" boost. (Atmel did that on their ARM7's-- 66MHz, then 72MHz, then 80MHz)

If an Uzebox was going to be controlling someone's pacemaker I'd probably be a little more concerned, but even if we go from 250,000 hours MTBF to 125,000 hours I doubt there's many that'd get that kind of continuous operation in. (like 14 years of 24/7 operation?)

-Clay

Re: First post: Welcome to the Uzebox forums!

Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2008 7:45 am
by uze6666
it would not surprise me in the least to one day find out that they simply won't rate the new Mega AVRs higher than 20MHz because they dont want to crowd in on the 32MHz rating for the XMegas
Hey, are you trying to say that I could have clocked them even higher? ...And I though I was already abusing! :D
If an Uzebox was going to be controlling someone's pacemaker I'd probably be a little more concerned, but even if we go from 250,000 hours MTBF to 125,000 hours I doubt there's many that'd get that kind of continuous operation in. (like 14 years of 24/7 operation?)
Exactly what I though. I run that same 644 on by prototype since more than a year, leaving it on 24/7 just to see when it will break. And you know what? It still runs rock solid...just amazing! The only reason I didn't try higher that 28.6Mhz was because I could not find any crystal that was a multiple of the NTSC color bust frequency. Though if anybody here has the money to order custom cut or programmable crystals, be my guest ;). I would love to know how far they can go.... 8-)

Uze

Re: First post: Welcome to the Uzebox forums!

Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2008 5:13 pm
by DaveyPocket
Is 78.750Mhz possible?