Archive for 'News'

New Hardware Revision

Max took a quick break from his vacations and was able to work on the new hardware revision of the snesram. Its mainly a bugfix to version 0.1 . We also did some cost reductions. Most obvious is to go for 2 Mbyte of sram instead of 4Mbyte. It just make the PCB smaller and [...]

Ucon64 Support

The software is coming down smoothly. Ported the usb uploader code to ucon64. Also Hirom support ist working now with ucon64 autodedection. So the Snesram board is becoming quite handy for daily dev work. This hardware revision has 2 bugs which doesn’t make it possible to print pcbs now. There is additional OR gate needed [...]

The eagle has landed!

Yeah, its working. Have been playing Super Mario Word last night. Did a few tests with different roms. Mainly Lorom, type 0 without save game ram. Was able to run games up to 16bmit. Couldn’t find any 32mbit type 0 games to test the complete ram area. Anyways its working finally. What de did? Resolder [...]

The magic of bus sharing

I did some more debugging over the weekend. The thing to investigate was why roms crash or hang when music starts. That was the last suspicion we had on thursday. So mukunda from #snesdev helped me and made a few test roms to investigate the problem with the SPC. First we started with a simple [...]

Timing Problems ?

Last night i had a long debug session with Max and we tried to track down the problem with the prototype board.The problem is that some homebrew roms are runinng fine, but most commerical games don’t even start. I can start up the game “Mr. Do”, but it hangs directly at the first intro screen. [...]

Working on the Firmware

The last 2 nights i spend some time debugging the firmware of the prototype board. I added CRC checks for the sram areas and each uploaded bank. Hence i can push roms to the sram and verify it at runtime on both sides. So i can see if there are any transfer errors. Iam not [...]

Debugging Days

Last night we spend atleast 3 hours to track down a little bug in the cpu fuse settings. After running first tests on the hardware we got debug uart and some basic sreg addressing working. Then we started to implement a sram read/write round trip. We found out that we read for all sram cells [...]

Dev Cart Block Diagramm

These two pictures show the different functional blocks of the prototype design. On the top side you have the MCU and next to it the connector for In-System-Programming and the MMC/SD daughter board. The yellow block marks the usb hardware for emulated software-usb on the mcu, the green block is the ram section. The orange [...]

The Eagle has landed – Assembled and powered up

Finally assembled and the pcb powers up. So iam posting a few more details photos. The boards powers up and the FTDI can be accessed via usb. So tomorrow i gonna meet with max and we will port the old firmware from the mega16 to the mega644. Tomorrow we might have simple usb based uploader [...]

The Eagle has landed

This monday morning the long awaited first prototype PCB arrived from pcb-pool. We had a little UPS problem on friday, so we had to wait till monday to get the PCB. Max just started to solder all the chips, looking forward to get a working usb uploader firmware running till the next weekend. I think [...]