Scuzzbox arrives!

[scuzz]

So it may not be a whole lot to celebrate yet, but I've got a neat update for those of you watching at home:

Picture of the Scuzzbox board and some parts

brd_plus_parts_scaled.jpg (119.33 KiB) Viewed 2442 times

Here's a bigger picture

I'm hoping to have it together and at least spewing serial data by the end of the month. Sorry the updates have been so slow in coming, but school is keeping me busy!

Anyway, I'm super excited to get started on kernel work here soon enough and get the thing up and playing some games.

[D3thAdd3r]

Sweet looking designs and board, what kind of price point could someone expect to put one of these together? Impressive stuff, interesting to see what kind of power can be utilized.

[scuzz]

Sweet looking designs and board

Thanks!

What kind of price point could someone expect to put one of these together? Impressive stuff, interesting to see what kind of power can be utilized.

The price for these boards (and the parts to go one them) was about $140 a pop, but that's including a lot of extra parts. You can see that I have 10 usb ports sitting in front of the boards, and I only need 1 per board, so it was overkill in one way, but it made those parts cheaper, and I can reuse these for later projects (or later revs of the board). I split this with a friend who's working on the project with me. Cutting out all the fluff it was probably around $80 a complete board, assuming that you go the route I did which is buying just enough of most parts to built the board, and then bought boards using 33each.com.

Anyway, with larger runs considering how "huge" the tolerances on the board are (8mils), and the fact that it's only two layers I think you could get it down by a lot. Though I did end up using a lot of weird resistor values which does drive up the cost. I'll work on fixing this once the prototype is working.

I'll post some more pictures once I have it semi-soldered!

[D3thAdd3r]

So at this point I'd imagine the planned features are at least semi-solid? You mentioned an IR interface which sounds very cool to me, if it doesn't cost much more, simple way to interface with PC for internet games. I don't really know the chip or what else you have on board, do you have a feature run down for my speculation and ranting pleasure?

[scuzz]

So at this point I'd imagine the planned features are at least semi-solid? You mentioned an IR interface which sounds very cool to me, if it doesn't cost much more, simple way to interface with PC for internet games. I don't really know the chip or what else you have on board, do you have a feature run down for my speculation and ranting pleasure?

Sure!

Currently we have pretty much every feature of the chip broken out, so it's a bit of a doozy:
1) ARM7 running at ~72MHz (probably slower when executing off ram, we'll see)
2) SD card slot
3) 1 Mbit external ram, so that you can load an entire game from the SD card and hold it in memory while you play. I was really hoping to avoid the issue of reflashing every time you loaded a new game, especially because I'm always paranoid about overdoing the read/write cycle on flash
4) 10/100 base-T ethernet
5) Host usb port (so that you could attach fun peripherals, like a usb joystick!)
6) Device usb port (so that you don't have to own a programmer to change the kernel code!)
7) IRDA port: this one actually has shifted a bit... The original IR port I had picked out had a range of something like 1.5 meters but they stopped selling it, so the current one I have on there only has a range of 30cm or something. I'll find a better one for the next rev
8) I didn't break it out this rev, but I could also add a battery and use the built-in real-time clock module to allow for persistent world games

This version has everything broken out for the fun of it. I'll probably take off things which most people don't (or won't) use. The usb host port, for example, adds a lot of complexity and an extra IC for power control, and most people probably won't make good use of it because you'll essentially have to reverse engineer any peripheral you want to add.

Those are the big and important features that I can think of. The notable "missing" features I hear people talking about all the time are off-chip audio/video, but I was trying to keep the chip count (and hopefully the complexity) down, and also trying to avoid diverging too far from the minimalist philosophy of the Uzebox. By most accounts I've failed at that but it should be fun and a bit more modular than the original Uzebox.

[D3thAdd3r]

Well definitely don't ditch the ram With 128k, even if it took a couple cycles to read, you have 32bit math and a big cache(no idea how that works with wait states). Depending on how you can get it to the screen, that's serious potential. Probably better than the 32x just because of speed if you have off chip video ie good enough to run Doom/Wolf(if you wanted to waste a lot of time porting it:)). Anyways it does sound reasonable to omit the usb host, and the IR is cool but with ethernet why bother if it's extra trouble. Are there any prebuilt drivers for the ethernet available? Suppose it is hard to know when to draw the line, but it should be very powerful even if you decide to go Uzebox style on the video. Really the price sounds very reasonable, but I wouldn't trust myself soldering it

[scuzz]

Are there any prebuilt drivers for the ethernet available?

Why yes! There's a whole bunch of demo code for the lpc23xx line of chip right on NXP's website. If you head over to the lpc2388 page, the link labeled "web; Sample Code Bundle for LPC23xx/LPC24xx Peripherals using Keil's MDK-ARM" has an example of pretty much every peripheral in code. The code in the folder "EMAC" is for the ethernet peripheral (probably because it doesn't include the TCP/IP stack so it's for barebones communication only).

School and sickness still keeping me busy, more updates as they come.

Really the price sounds very reasonable, but I wouldn't trust myself soldering it

Bah! You can solder it! You can solder anything if you put your mind to it </cheesy> In all seriousness though, I even made a point of trying to make it easy by putting in only 1206 components (12mm x 6mm) which means that all of the resistors and capacitors are HUGE! Well, my perspective is a bit skewed because I work on 0603 and 0402 components for work, but the point is that it isn't going to get much easier for surface mount parts, save for the ICs. The ICs, I will be the first to admit, will probably be a bear. But if you finished all those 1206 components? You'll have had lots of experience with SMD

[1UP]

Almost sounds and looks like the start of a full fledged computer, rather than a game console . That would be cool kind of like the first computers people built back in the day with things like the Heathkit or what Atari planned with 2600 / 7800 with keyboards and serial I/O from the Joystick ports very retro .

in fact if you went that route, folks could use your "Scuzzbox" as either a console or a standalone computer that could also be used as a way of creating games for the UZEBOX, the data could then be transfered through a cable to the UZEBOX. That way a serious hobbyist would have built themselves a retro style dev system like the ones from the late 70's to the early / mid 80's .

but that is probably not the aim of this project but that would be somthing I would buy hehehe since it would since it would effectively give the users a complete hardware dev system to test and write code on and would respect the design ideas of the original project as well as give the community a new fast little computer to create apps as well as games for.

just my 2 cents as a new forum member, me and my credit card will be watching this thread with great interest

1UP

[scuzz]

Almost sounds and looks like the start of a full fledged computer, rather than a game console . That would be cool kind of like the first computers people built back in the day with things like the Heathkit or what Atari planned with 2600 / 7800 with keyboards and serial I/O from the Joystick ports very retro .

Yeah, it's pretty powerful, though just like the Uzebox a lot of cycles will likely be taken up by sound processing (possibly video processing, but I actually think we could chop this down a lot with a 32 bit word size). But yes! This is almost like a computer you can build for yourself, and it won't be hard to make that leap because I know that uClinux is already compatible with the lpc2388. If you go that route though you'll need to write drivers for things like the video and sound output if you make use of it. That being said I'm planning on writing a kernel from the ground up to make it more like a video game console, and closely emulate the Uzebox's API calls so that games which are already written are portable to the new system.

in fact if you went that route, folks could use your "Scuzzbox" as either a console or a standalone computer that could also be used as a way of creating games for the UZEBOX, the data could then be transfered through a cable to the UZEBOX. That way a serious hobbyist would have built themselves a retro style dev system like the ones from the late 70's to the early / mid 80's .

That seems a little silly, especially since this box won't be capable of programming the Uzebox more than a computer! Well, in theory I could probably hack a bit-banging program to make that work, but that'd be kind of ridiculous... I guess I'd just be curious how the Scuzzbox would serve as a better dev platform for a plain old computer. It may serve as a nice stepping stone for newer programmers because hopefully it will be able to be 90% portable and they can write sloppier code and the extra speed will compensate. Then when they're really buckling down and trying to learn how to write good, tight, fast code, they can move on to getting it to run on the minimalist console.

just my 2 cents as a new forum member, me and my credit card will be watching this thread with great interest

Glad to hear it! I'll try and keep you guys up to date as this gets rolling around. Currently trying to survive the onslaught of finals and work deadlines.

[1UP]

Hey Scuzz

Yeah I know I get kinda of silly with Ideas and stuff but it really did remind me a lot of the old dev systems used back in the day at places like Atari,Imagic,Activision Ect, your right it would be better to use a pc in this day and age along with the emulator for development.

cant wait to see more info on this project as it is loaded to the hilt with great hardware and would be a power house for game dev in the open source console arena.

1UP