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#Hardware design
lil-tachyon · 1 year
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Hardware designs for unannounced video game
It's a very fun change of pace to do something more in the vein of concept art than illustration. I haven't done this kind of visdev and item design stuff since back when I worked on AZAG
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I'm totally open to working more on the concept art side of things if anyone's ever thought about hiring me for that by the way. Heck I was an engineer for several years, if you needed me to design something machinable or 3D printable I could honestly still do that for ya
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secretgamergirl · 4 months
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Console Design- Can I have my cake and eat it too?
Recently I spilled the beans that I have a little hobby project slowly brewing away where I am designing a new game console. I'm still not ready to really properly pitch the whole thing, but between sharing that, explaining computer architecture, and seeing people's feedback, it keeps pushing itself towards the front burners over more practical projects I SHOULD be giving my focus to, and while people are paying attention, I might as well try to crowdsource answers to some questions I'm getting hung up on.
So... a lot of what I'm doing here is, I'll be honest, rooted in nostalgia for 16-bit consoles. There's a certain retro appeal to the look, speed, and general immediacy of 8-bit games, and more than plenty of support for making games that evoke that feel, and even recently made free dev tools for people to just make new games for older systems, and as I'm writing this, there is this massive renaissance going on with indie devs restricting them to the constraints of early polygonal-graphics-focused consoles, but we mostly skipped right past that 16-bit period, and all its hallmarks:
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2D graphics with more color-depth than people really knew what to do with. All sorts of hardware-level flashy effects like transparency, resolution changes, neat little raster effects. A soundscape of crunchy FM synth and sparingly used sampling with distortion effects. Just a little taste of support for polygonal graphics. Not enough to go all-in, but enough to make a nice spice here and there. A general push to show off with fancy jointed paper doll sprites, 3D effects from sprite-scaling, just... clear ambitions all over to make low res 2D eye candy. Plus everything was cartridge based, allowing people to add extra custom chips for things they really wanted that they didn't quite have the power for.
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So that's basically what I want to deliver here. A platform where you have more toys and tricks than you know what to do with if you're coming from 8-bit style stuff, but a real tricky set of restrictions to work around from a more modern approach, hopefully with its own look and sound. To that end I've been doing a ton of research into how some of those work... and a lot of it involves fun little tricks between scanlines. In particular, if you look at that mode 7 video above, right around 7:50, we've got this real eye-popping barrel distortion background. What's going on here, on a hardware level, is we have the ability to, essentially, apply one single image as a texture to a single parallelogram, which in this case is just taking a rectangular background and squishing it in towards the center then out towards its regular dimensions... but where doing that squishing and stretching between individual scan lines as we send the video out to the screen. Several changes to the shape before we've even finished rendering out one frame of the video, and tada, weird barrel.
Being able to support tricks like THAT, specifically, is a must-have feature for what I'm working on, and I'm pretty confident I can design the hardware with that exact capability... but the original hardware doing that was, to my understanding, very much working with the peculiarities of how a CRT worked and the exact number of operations it could get done while the beam was swiping back to the left to draw the next line, and I legitimately have no idea if tricks like this are even really possible if I slap together a similar chipset and send video out an HDMI cord to a modern display.
Like, I know I can fake that. I've got a Retron 5 hooked to a cheap flat panel TV with Castlevania 4 plugged in, but my understanding is that's actually emulating an SNES in software on some very-much-overkill for this sort of thing modern processor. What I would LIKE to do is build this with a chipset you really can push to its limits, hooked to modern display, and get this sort of effect. Because while I realize a big chunk of the audience for this sort of thing totally have nice well-maintained CRTs, I don't want to be married to hardware people no longer manufacture. And I'd rather not have some way more capable sub-processor wedged in here just to get the video output of whatever cheap fast legit 16-bit chipset I use otherwise to play nice with HDMI standards.
I'm still sort of in the dark about HDMI and modern display options, to be clear. And you know in a perfect world I'd like to have support built into this if you want to hook it to a CRT, but at the end of the day I need to pick an aspect ratio, and it's probably gonna be 16:9.
A similar fork in the road I may need to pick a lane for before I can really get going is looking at ASIC chips. What I'd really love is to be able to just point people at a design files for the casing and PCBs, and a warehouse of old mass-produced chips that sell for pennies, make the whole thing a neat little home electronics kit where the total price of everything is like, maybe $10 or $20 or something, you get out a soldering iron, and assemble it all yourself. But, I might need to custom design a chip or two in the end, and there's a chance it ends up being cheaper to just build literally the whole system on one chip. Simpler, easier to make a portable version of the whole thing, but it loses that DIY feel.
And of course there's also the risk that the overall architecture and chipset I'm looking at isn't going to have the oomph to do what I want it to do at a nice steady 60 FPS (maybe 120?) I'm just kind of assuming once I commit to a path I'll be able to find a dirt cheap chipset covering all the bases I need it to that'll hold up at a faster clock speed than consoles really ran at in the mid-90s. I want people to be able to do things smoothly that historically really had some slowdown, and you know, I AM planning to have a higher base resolution than the systems I'm taking inspiration from (maybe the same height but clearly more width).
And of course the real pain is going to be prototyping all this since none of it's going to work without hooking display AND something popped into a cartridge slot. I'm at least saving myself some headache starting with a controller I can at least test in other things, but wow there's gonna be so many different potential failure points to worry about at one step in here.
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arushi-monga2001 · 7 months
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echobravofoxtrot · 4 months
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celebrating fall with fletcher's checksum
This post originally appeared on my website.
why are checksums useful for fpga development?
Checksum functions are useful for error detection and data integrity. With respect to FPGA architecture development, a checksum can ensure the system is able to retain its state. For example, an FPGA programmed to behave like an AND gate should not start to act like an OR gate due fluctuations in voltage or temperature. Such problems may be caught by computing the checksum of the bitstream before configuring the FPGA, operating the device in the lab, and then extracting the bitstream and re-computing the checksum to ensure it has not changed.
The last two FPGAs that I worked on-with Indiana University's SAIL-IN Lab and the QuickLogic Corporation-used a scan chain configuration interface which lent itself well to bitstream verification via checksum. The scan chain acts like a serial shift register, stringing together all the configuration chain flip-flops in the FPGA fabric. As the bitstream flows through the head of the scan chain, one bit at a time, its checksum may be computed; and later re-computed as it flows out of the tail. For context, imagine a small, thirty-two flop scan chain and the corresponding bitstream, 0xdeadbeef. On the way in, the Fletcher's (32-bit) checksum will be 0xf13b. If the post-configuration checksum does not match, the engineers would know that there is an issue with the FPGA architecture.
Fletcher's checksum also produces check bytes (or a "tag"), which can be appended to the end of the original data, such that the new checksum of the data and the check bytes is zero. For the example bitstream 0xdeadbeef, the resulting check bytes are 0xd2f1. And the checksum of 0xdeadbeefd2f1 is 0x0.
fletcher's checksum in systemverilog
Based mostly on the Wikipedia entry for Fletcher's checksum, I produced a parameterized, three-state module which computes the checksum and check bytes of a data stream. The SystemVerilog closesly follows the below psuedo-code. For the Fletcher-32 checksum, data arrives as 16-bit half-words.
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Eventually, I'd like to wrap it in a SPI interface and submit it to TinyTapeout, but for now here's the bare RTL. The most up-to-date code is also available on GitHub:
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learnandgrowcommunity · 7 months
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VHDL Tutorial : Your First VHDL Design: VHDL Entity & Architecture - A Beginner's Guide
Welcome to the ultimate beginner's guide for Your First VHDL Design! In this video, we will dive into the fundamentals of VHDL Entity and Architecture and provide you with a comprehensive understanding of the topic. Whether you are new to VHDL or looking to refresh your knowledge, this guide is designed to help you get started and pave your way to becoming an expert VHDL designer. In this tutorial, we will cover the basics of VHDL, starting with the VHDL Entity and its crucial role in the design process. You will learn how to define and describe the inputs and outputs of your VHDL design using the Entity section, providing the necessary specifications for your project. Moving on, we will explore the VHDL Architecture, which defines the actual implementation of your design. Through a step-by-step walkthrough, you will discover how to construct the architecture block by block, ensuring a well-structured and functional VHDL design. To make the learning experience more practical, we will dive into real-world examples and demonstrate each concept using a popular VHDL software tool. You'll witness the transition from theory to practice, gaining hands-on experience in VHDL design. With this beginner's guide, you'll not only grasp the essentials of VHDL Entity and Architecture but also acquire the ability to kickstart your own VHDL designs, opening up a wide range of possibilities in digital circuit design. Subscribe to our channel for more exciting VHDL tutorials and stay tuned for upcoming videos in this series where we will explore advanced VHDL concepts and applications.
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epsilonelectronic · 7 months
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7 Tips on Choosing Right electronics hardware,hardware design company in Gujarat. Here we listed for tips to make the most of your hardware design and software design also.
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arcadebroke · 8 months
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industrydesignservices · 10 months
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Teksun Inc is an ISO 9001:2015 certified IoT and AI Solutions Company specializing in Product Engineering Services supporting ODM & OEM for numerous B2B Applications & Use Cases. To know more about browse: https://teksun.com/ Contact us ID: [email protected]
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staygolden-ponyboy · 3 months
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atriauniversity · 2 years
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secretgamergirl · 4 months
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A controller with a scroll wheel, you say?
Well this is a little funny. Yesterday I posted the first part of a series of post on the fine details of how computers work, mentioning how I've been looking into this as part of a personal project I've been working on, and today I wake up to see Masahiro Sakurai posting a youtube video lamenting the lack of... this exact thing I'm working on.
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Apologies for how much cat hair is in this photo, that's a bit of an occupational hazard, but this here is a photo I took back in September when most of the parts I had to order were in for the prototyping of this thing:
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That's a really bad MS Paint mockup, but yeah. I'm designing my own game console, and one of the key features is a big ol' scroll wheel right in the center of the controller. Another is that I'm planning to just put all the designs of the circuit boards and 3D printer files for the casing/buttons up online for free, making it this totally open DIY thing where anyone who's a big enough nerd can just make a couple downloads, order some dirt cheap components, and build their own copy of the system (or people with better setups than me can build and sell them, whatever). So I'm not super worried about anyone stealing my ideas or whatever, but I WOULD like to establish a standard and all that, and figured it was worth noting that this is something I've been slowly working towards for like a year or two now, and didn't just get the idea from this video:
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But yeah, now that the idea's out in the public consciousness, here's the plan for the controller (that I was planning to keep under my hat until I had a working prototype and some demo software sometime next year).
First off, the plan is that this is to be the standard controller for a whole console I'm also plucking away at designing, which is a bit more ambitious of a project, so I figure I might as well make it compatible with something that's already out there. So specifically, I'm designing this so that you can take one, plug it right into an SNES (or with a different connector at the end, an NES, because turns out they use the exact same input handling standard and it's just the shape of the plastic on the end that differs), and have it just work. Or mostly work anyway. I'm hoping I can process a signal out of the scroll wheel in a way that it either just needs the 3 extra bits of the input signal I don't have buttons for in my design (more on that later) or failing that, I can get it to output the same sort of signal as one wheel in the SNES mouse, which just rides along the second data line very few things use. I think that plan might break multitap compatibility and require an extra chip on the controller PCB, but it would leave this slightly more compatible with existing games on the same hardware. I might also do something weird with the button mapping to be sure NES select is on a shoulder and it works right out of the box with that whole library.
Working out exactly how to handle signals from the scroll wheel happens to be the point I'm currently stuck on by the way. I got this baggie full of rotary encoders for just a few cents which... almost fit in my first draft 3D printed wheel housing, but I have NO documentation on them, not even a part number/manufacturer besides "H-9," the pins don't fit a breadboard, and I've kinda been scrambling for rent so I can't afford a nice multimeter or oscilloscope to poke around with. Plus again I need to redesign this wheel print to even get it to spin right, and... this was a gift from a friend with a printer who is Not Local. Solvable problem, just needs more time and/or outside expertise.
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But yeah, once I have those kinks worked out, it should be easy enough to get a custom board design made, replicas of end-cap of the controller cord are another problem easily solved by ordering a 1 dollar part or 3D printing something. The actual cord might be tricky since I don't know where you actually order something like that from, but it should be easy enough for anyone who doesn't mind a little assembly work to put one of these together and have it good to go for any software made with it in mind, or retrogames where you don't mind a weird button count. So... what's the pitch on this scroll wheel anyway?
Well for starters, there's the stuff Sakurai got into this morning. Any sort of RPG or text heavy game can use it to quickly scroll through menu options, or stuff in a text-heavy game. You could also pan the screen with it, something a lot of early 16-bit games assigned to the shoulder buttons or holding up and down while getting used to the new options the hardware was giving them.
Past that, you'll notice in my design it's at a 45 degree angle. I might have to tweak it a little, but my thinking is for a game that uses it heavily, one thumb or the other can slide over easily enough (I'm going for a pretty compact overall design) so we can have some games where you take your thumb off the D-pad, and have this nice analogue steering wheel. Nice for fine control in a racing game, or if you want some little radio-tuning/safe-cracking sorta deal.
Alternatively, move your right thumb over, use the D-pad to steer, shoot and dodge or whatever with shoulder buttons, and use the wheel to rotate a turret for a twin-stick sort of game maybe.
Or just use it for the sort of stuff mouse based games stick on the scrollwheel. Changing weapons, changing powerups... I'm planning to officially label the directions "hot" and "cold" to encourage weird gimmicky things like... I dunno, a platformer where you have a thermostat in your controller you can always mess with, freeze water coming out of pipes, crank up flame jets? Have a shot charging mechanic where you just really crank it to get to max strength? Weird minigame stuff. There's some fun space to explore with it.
Then we have the rest of the design here... which basically comes down to me being just plain sick of how every controller made by anyone in the past... 20 years give or take has kind of the exact same layout? 4 good face buttons, a D-pad, 4 shoulder buttons, 2 sticks, and 1-4 annoying to reach tiny awkward middle buttons, and we're just kind of overdue for a change-up?
Like first of all, hey, this is just too many buttons. There's a ton of games that really only need a D-pad, and maybe 3 buttons (attack jump pause) and the two things that aren't fully standardized is how awkwardly placed the D-pad is and how awful and awkwardly placed the pause button is. Shoulder buttons can be nice, but I've never really felt like 4 of them awkwardly crammed on the rim has been really useful or ergonomic, and that's coming from someone who's been playing a ton of FF14, which gets more use out of them than anything else I could name. And really, aside from games doing fake twin-stick stuff and using the whole grid like a second D-pad, I'm having a really hard time thinking of any game I've ever played that really makes good use of 4 good face buttons? Like people will use them if they've got'em sure, but unless you do that keyboard style thing where you lay the controller on a table and use all your fingers, you can really only comfortably hit 2 face buttons without sliding your thumb away from them, maybe comfortably make a quick pivot to a third.
Also, really, a lot of designers just sort of feel compelled to map SOMETHING to every button, even if it's clear the design didn't really need them. So basically I figure I'll try kinda just taking a "less is more" approach here. Here's the buttons that it's comfortable to rest your thumbs and fingers on, here's a dedicated pause/menu button where people often stick a kind of redundant menu button, here's my gimmicky scrollwheel. That's it, work around that.
I'm also going a little Gamecube inspired (literally using replacement membranes for one in my prototype design, even). Gonna make a great big primary button and use different shapes for the other two. Trying to label these in a less arbitrary fashion than most. If shooting a gun is a thing you do in this game, and there isn't a real good reason not to, default it to this nice right trigger you can hold down all the time. If we're advancing through menus or jumping or holding down gas in a car, here's the big GO button. Need brakes, need to break stuff with a melee attack? Go back in a menu system? There's your other face button. Have a quick dash move or a run you hold down, let's just use the other shoulder.
So yeah. That's my controller. Need to work out the kinks on the scroll wheel, source a cord, and hopefully I can slap things together and this will be something you can just order bits for piecemeal and put together for like, $5-10 after shipping? Maybe less? The parts are shockingly cheap so far.
But yeah if anyone has any insight to the scroll wheel or cord issues, let me know. Also the whole thing is presently a tad back-burnered because I am in a serious financial crisis and I don't want to have electronics spread all over my table if I have to abruptly find a new place to live if I can't scrape next month's rent together. So as usual, donations are incredibly welcome.
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arushi-monga2001 · 8 months
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Leading IoT & Electronics Manufacturer| Napino Digital Solutions
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pixelfireplace · 4 months
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Compaq Portable II
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msterpicasso · 7 months
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@caseyxjean
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learnandgrowcommunity · 7 months
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VHDL Basics - Language for Hardware Design : Know why you need to learn VHDL?
What is VHDL? VHDL, short for Very High-Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description Language, is a powerful and widely used language for designing digital circuits and systems. If you're interested in digital electronics or pursuing a career in hardware design, learning VHDL is essential. Why Learn VHDL? Understanding VHDL gives you the ability to design and simulate complex digital systems, ranging from simple logic gates to advanced processors. VHDL allows you to describe the behavior and structure of these circuits accurately, enabling efficient development and debugging. By learning VHDL, you gain the skills to create efficient and reliable hardware designs. How to Learn VHDL? Learning VHDL doesn't have to be intimidating! In this tutorial video, we will guide you through the basics of VHDL, explaining the syntax, data types, and essential concepts. We'll also provide practical examples and hands-on exercises to reinforce your understanding. Whether you're a beginner or have some experience with digital design, this video will help you grasp VHDL quickly. Join Our VHDL Community Connect with fellow VHDL enthusiasts and learners in our vibrant community. Share ideas, ask questions, and collaborate with others passionate about hardware design. Our community is a supportive and engaging space to expand your knowledge and stay updated with the latest VHDL developments. Subscribe to Learn and Grow Community for Regular updates. Subscribe to our community for more informative videos and guidance. Stay tuned for tutorials, tips, and tricks to enhance your skills. Hit the notification bell to never miss an update.
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thenarrativefoil · 4 months
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I finished painting my shoes~~~ 😄✨
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