Re: VECTOR: Whatever happened to the RAT Box and ArcadeIDE (MK ICE?) projects?

Hello all,
    My version of these projects has not progressed much either. See the
following link for a photo of the PCB.

www.nemonic.freeserve.co.uk/cat_box.JPG

The board is based on an Altera FPGA and is basically a PC (Parallel port)
hosted Atari CAT box with tweaks. It has built in support for the CAT box
Atari diagnostic connector (50 pin header ) and 6502, 68B09 and Z80 CPUs.
The smaller 10 pin header is the JTAG header for programming the FPGA. The
FPGA used is a 7128 with 2 pins and 9% logic spare so not much room to add
anything. The logic design has been simulated to death and initial simple
software seems to support the theoretical results. The PCB shown has the BNC
connectors for the signature analysis missing as my PCB layout symbol was
wrong !

All read and write operations to the target hardware are target clock
synchronised, so ram tests will work event if the CPU can only see the ram
for 1/2 the time as is common in many raster based games.

I'll currently writing the PC software in Borland C++ builder. As well as
the CAT box generic tests, my software will allow you to load a 'hardware
definition file' that will automate the process of testing a particular PCB.
Don't expect miracles time wise. Thorough I am, fast I am not.

Comments ...

Regards

Mike Mnemonic (UK)

----- Original Message -----
From: "James R. Twine" <jtwine@jrtwine.com>
To: "Rasterlist@Synthcom.Com" <rasterlist@synthcom.com>;
<vectorlist@synthcom.com>
Sent: Friday, March 07, 2003 1:07 AM
Subject: VECTOR: Whatever happened to the RAT Box and ArcadeIDE (MK ICE?)
projects?

> [Sent to both lists...]
>
> Whatever happened to the ArcadeIDE and RAT Box projects? Last I can
> find, they were last talked about (in various stages of completion) in
> 2000. I just got interested again because I am likely buying a Fluke
> 9010 in the near future, and it reminded me of those projects.
>
> Peace!
>
> [Get Check Favorites 1.5 Now! http://checkfavs.jrtwine.com]
> -=- James R. Twine, MCP, (jtwine@jrtwine.com)
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Received on Mon Mar 31 21:35:38 2003