Re: DVG Multigame

If you're allergic to my nitpicking stop reading right now.

A 22V10 isn't a PAL. It's a GAL. Or at least that's what Lattice called it.
Always kind of liked that part (the Lattice version), because it was quickly
erased, kept track of how many times it had been programmed, and even had a small
area for storing a label or part number. It's the only chip I had ever used.
Oddly enough I used PALASM to write the program for it.

Now other companies make versions of it, some aren't erasable, some are. Some are
CMOS, some aren't. All kinds of speed ranges. Too damn confusing to be fun
anymore.

Clay Cowgill wrote:

> > This looks like a subject that could well develop into a religious war,
> >so all I'm going to say is: if _you_ like 'em, more power to you, but a PAL
> >will _never_ be my first choice for a circuit design. :)
>
> I must confess that I used to have the *exact* same mindset you did until I
> got over the initial learning curve on PALs (and programmable logic in
> general) and then the more I used them the more useful I found them...
>
> One other little thing that's nice about PALs is that you don't have to have
> a huge array of parts in your work-bins and when it comes time to
> experiment. (...and if you build multiple projects like I do, you don't need
> to stock a bazillion different IC's.)
>
> This is sorta vaguely related, but one of my friends here did what I think
> is the hardware hack of the decade. His company made SNES development
> systems. Well, he made a low-cost SNES cart that was used for music
> authoring and/or graphics development for companies so they wouldn't have to
> buy a bunch of (his) $10K ICE systems for writing a soundtrack. Anyway,
> there's *one* part in it. It's a 22V10. He figured out how to encode
> enough 65816 instructions onto the PAL so that it would actually boot the
> SNES and then wait for input from a parallel printer port with the rest of
> the code which got shoved into RAM. Once the code was loaded from a PC, the
> 22V10 turned into a bidirectional printer-port for upload/download of the
> music/sound data depending on the product. Very clever design. (I think
> they sold it for something like $999 each, which was a steal compared to a
> full ICE. A lot of the cost was in the music and graphics editing software
> development, but the company still did really well with it...)
>
> -Clay
>
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--
Windows:
32 bit graphical interface for a
16 bit patch for an
8 bit operating system written for a
4 bit processor by a
2 bit company that can't stand
1 bit of competition.
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