MiSTer Uzebox Core?

Discuss general Uzebox topics here: features, wish list. nice to have, etc.
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Kannibal
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MiSTer Uzebox Core?

Post by Kannibal »

Hello,

I joined this forum to ask about the possibility of a Uzebox core for the MiSTer. Been enjoying everything available on the MiSTer so far and remembered about this little project from a while ago. I used to look forward to saving up for a little Uzebox but never got one. Definitely like the original games made for it and would love to enjoy them again as an FPGA core. What do you guys think is the viability in this task?

Regards,
Kannibal
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uze6666
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Re: MiSTer Uzebox Core?

Post by uze6666 »

Ahhh yes...I heard of this project quite some time ago and it's impressive the quantity of machines that are now implemented. I saw the arduboy in the list so there's already an Atmega core done and available. So everything is feasible of course, all being a question of time, dedication and, in this case, FPGA knowledge I assume. I don't think a lot have this knowledge here unfortunately. But for sure the community would be glad to help anyone who does.

Edit: I've went through some youtube vids and the very good documentation and could well see myself tinker with this after I finish my current project. And who can be against having more peoples experience the Uzebox games. :)
Kannibal
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Re: MiSTer Uzebox Core?

Post by Kannibal »

Thanks for supporting this idea! There are some exclusive Uzebox games that deserve exposure and maybe Uzebox might experience a renaissance because of this :lol: .
rv6502
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Re: MiSTer Uzebox Core?

Post by rv6502 »

Just a heads up, I suspect the atmega core is buggy.

There's some weird stuff that happens with Starduino inside emulators and on the MiSTer's Arduboy core it doesn't run at all.
Not sure if I'm reading some OOB memory or if my assembly code is using some ALU flags that gcc never uses that trips the emulation (or maybe both if the buggy ALU flags causes clipping to fail in some rare cases.)

Starduino works fine on hardware but I've hit some crashes in the emulator :cry:

I want to make a CPU test sketch at some point and verify all the ALU corner cases in emulators & FPGA core.
Will be investigating that as soon as I find the time, just moved, uzebox is somewhere in the mountain of yet to be unpacked boxes.

The neat thing with the MiSTer is it's possible to output both the RGB signal directly while also capturing it to a scanline or frame buffer for HDMI upscaling.
And they got real hardware NES/SNES adapters and a direct secondary micro-SD card access that in theory just needs a full-size socket to allow old MMC cards.

It'd be a lot harder to reproduce the WiFi adapter but it could be connected to a physical one instead through the external GPIO port (used for real SNES controllers)
Kannibal
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Re: MiSTer Uzebox Core?

Post by Kannibal »

Thanks for that update. Glad to know there is further interest in the idea of a Uzebox FPGA core :)
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uze6666
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Re: MiSTer Uzebox Core?

Post by uze6666 »

Yeah, thanks for the update! I will definitely check your progress.
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danboid
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Re: MiSTer Uzebox Core?

Post by danboid »

I wonder if one of these would help make a Uzebox core for the MiSTer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_micro ... PGA_clones
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Jubatian
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Re: MiSTer Uzebox Core?

Post by Jubatian »

A bit old topic, just in case any of you might still be looking at it.

We have a tool to perform an extremely throughout ALU test on an AVR: https://uzebox.org/wiki/UzeBurn . It is very unlikely that this would miss something off in an AVR implementation, be it emulator or "hardware" (VHDL / Verilog) clone.
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