Where did that year go?

2017-12-28

Well it’s been nearly a year since my last post, and in the break between Christmas and New Year I once again have a few spare hours to tinker with projects.  I’ve used a few of these to get the MIST Sega Genesis / Megadrive core working, at last, on the Chameleon 64.

The reason for my extended absence is that a little over a year ago my father passed away, so a big part of the last year has been taken up with dealing with his affairs.  This task isn’t quite complete, but the end is now in sight.

So am I back?

Well… no, not really – I tend to go through phases of interest, from music, to electronics, to programming, to FPGA development and I’m not in an FPGA “phase” at the moment so I don’t anticipate putting significant time into FPGA projects in the near future but I do have a couple of other retro themed projects in mind which I may post about in due course.

In the meantime, here’s a link to the binary Genesis/Megadrive core for the Chameleon 64:  fpgagen_chameleon_20171218.zip

This is pretty much equivalent to the MIST Megadrive core, so it’s basically Torlus’s original core but making use of my ZPU-based control module for ROM loading (integrated by Phoboz) with Jotego’s implementation of the sound chips.

There are plenty of bugs and rough edges – and in particular the bandwidth of the current SDRAM controller isn’t high enough to supply all sprite channels, so there are issues with flickery sprites in many games.  Nonetheless, it’s fun to play with – so enjoy!

7 thoughts on “Where did that year go?

  1. Sorry to hear about your father passing away. My condolences. Quickly tested NHL95 and Shadow of Beast with this core and found out that controls are reversed. If you push joystick down character moves left, up = right, left = down, right = up. Well, hopefully you can update Minimig for Chameleon later and thanks again for your work on all these cores 🙂

  2. My condolences.

    About Genesis core: nice work!

    As I remember, TC64 can handle in theory 3-button joy or gamepad connected to DB-9 port: additional buttons can be wired to pin 5 & 9. In most cases you need to modify a standard Atari-compatible joy, I use now a rewired Quickshot II Plus, it works perfect with current (latest) PC Engine core, althought it handles only 2 buttons. Early Genesis gamepads had only 3 buttons + Start, the latter could be mapped to keyboard, the remain 3 would be enough in most cases.

  3. I was unaware your father passed until now. That is terrible, I am so sorry.

    It seems you are the only one capable of working on the Minimig core for Turbo Chameleon. Do you have any plans to bring it more up to date? Would a bounty help?

    Again, my condolences.

    • Thanks for the condolences. Updating the Chameleon core is vaguely on my “to do” list but I have much less time for tinkering with this stuff than I used to, and plenty of other projects calling for my attention – so I’m not going to make any promises.

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