Internalregister's homebrew "Z80" (FPGA) based console

Discuss anything not related to the current Uzebox design like successors and other open source gaming hardware
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danboid
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Internalregister's homebrew "Z80" (FPGA) based console

Post by danboid »

Here's a cool Z80 based homebrew retro console that the creator managed to port a couple of Uzebox games to.

The bad news is that it uses a FPGA for most of the work and it doesn't look like he's going to release any schematics or try to create a community around it like Uze did, which I think is a shame as its spec appears to be a little bit better than the Uzebox and I think it'd be great if there was a decent fully open source alternative retro console platform to the Uzebox. A SEGA to Uze's Nintendo, if you will.

Specs:

Z80 compatible CPU running at 16.66MHZ , running about 27% of the time.
64KB RAM for CPU memory space
AY-3-8910 compatible sound
50fps, 256x224 pixel resolution
256 colors, colorspace RGB332
1 scrollable background layer of 64x64 tiles of 8x8 pixels each, 4bpp or 8bpp
128 simultaneous sprites on screen 4bpp or 8bpp, 8x8 or 16x16 pixels, with a maximum of 256 sprite pixels per line
16 palettes for 4bpp graphics
64KB RAM for graphics (Character RAM)
HDMA that can copy up to 16 bytes per line to a location in VDP RAM
SD Card reader
Access to 2 Mega Drive / Genesis compatible controllers
Composite PAL video output

Active Components:

Atmega324p microcontroller
AS6C1008 128KB RAM
AD724 Video encoder
EP2C5 FGPA development board
LM358 op-amp

Connectors:

2 DB9 male connectors for the game controllers
3.5mm jack female to output video and audio
micro sd card slot
micro usb connector for power

https://internalregister.github.io/2021 ... nsole.html
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Artcfox
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Re: Internalregister's homebrew "Z80" (FPGA) based console

Post by Artcfox »

That looks really cool, and it can have a huge amount of sprites active at once, but even if the source code was available, being based on a discontinued FPGA board doesn't make it too hobbyist friendly.
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danboid
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Re: Internalregister's homebrew "Z80" (FPGA) based console

Post by danboid »

I wonder how hard it would be to port this to the MiSTer, MEGA65 or Spectrum Next?
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