Arduino Vidor 4000 springs into life

The very talented Arnim Laeuger has been working with our new Replay framework to bring his games to the Arudino Vidor 4000 FPGA platform (called V4 from here down) The Vidor is a low cost FPGA board available here : https://store.arduino.cc/mkr-vidor-4000 To support...

Replay Generations

I have an original Replay1a board back for repair at the moment, so I thought I would take a picture of the family together. R1a on the left. R1b next with the 68060 daughter board. Top right the Arduino MKRVidor4000 we are targeting to be a low cost R1 replacement....

Last few 68060 daughterboards….

We’ve sold all the boards in Europe. Jim Drew still has one or two in the US which can be shipped anywhere. If you have a Replay1 board, this is your last change to get one! Ping me or Jim. Cheers, Mike

Gyruss Konami 503 Replacement

Took a quick break from the new Replay build system today and tested a batch of replacement 503 ICs. They appear to work well, so I can ship the board back to it’s owner and get some desk space back! You can see the new 40 pin module working on the board below....

Konami 40 pin IC replacement

Finally, after being stuck in Swedish customs for nearly a month (thanks PostNord), the PCB for my 40 pin Konami 503 ASIC replacement has arrived. I’m experimenting with an Atmel 5V CPLD on these, rather than the old Altera MAX7064 which is getting hard to get,...
Last Replay1 shipped….

Last Replay1 shipped….

The final complete R1 & 68060 DB to ship Well, actually the last (I thought) Replay1 shipped years ago, but I’ve had one sitting around which failed production test. When a core boots up, the ini file for that core tells the software which files to upload...
Gyruss reverse engineering

Gyruss reverse engineering

Here at FPGAArcade we’ve always tried to reproduce retro hardware for preservation as accurately as possible. When I did the first Pacman design years ago it was quite easy as there were only a few custom ICs. I built some analysis hardware you can find way back...
Replay2 proto-board arrived

Replay2 proto-board arrived

We’ve bought a number of Ultra96 boards which contain a similar FPGA to the target device on Replay2. This will kick start development, especially on the Linux side. I’m also designing a small add-on board with the video output devices we’ll use on...

Replay2 first mock up

Very rough CAD drawing to play with IO connectors Replay2 is now in PCB design. We are using a Xilinx Ultrascale+ MPSoC device which combines a fast FPGA and a 64 bit Cortex A53 cluster. The device is built on 16nm FinFET+ logic. The processor system runs up to...

Replay2 …. the saga continues

So first, I must apologise for it being quiet here news-wise. The active development is mostly on Slack now, but I will try and post updates here more often. So, Replay2 stalled. The issue was the excellent price/performance of the DE10 board (used in the Mister...
Replay2

Replay2

Over the years there has been a lot of frustration about the lack of Replay boards. The main issue was the lack of quality control on components from China which caused a lot of rework effort. In retrospect, we should probably have thrown these away and built new...
Acorn Electron Core

Acorn Electron Core

A little over 34 years ago, Acorn Computers Ltd released a budget version of the BBC Micro, the Acorn Electron. For a time it was apparently the best selling Micro in the United Kingdom, although in more recent years the Electron seems to be overshadowed by its big...
ALICE decap and imaged

ALICE decap and imaged

We commissioned the decap and scanning of Alice, probably the most important custom chip in the Amiga. Thanks to John Hertell for the device, and to John McMaster for the decap and scan. Here is the image data in full :...
Replay 68060 daughterboard

Replay 68060 daughterboard

The layout for the Replay 68060 board is complete and has been sent for manufacture. It adds 128MB of local RAM, USB, Ethernet, RTC as well as additional Midi and LED IO connectors. The picture below is a quick mock-up to see if the components actually fit 🙂  ...
New Amiga Core

New Amiga Core

A new Amiga core was just released with a fix on the RTG interrupt + new RTG driver that handle the interrupt correctly....
More recovered Atari documents

More recovered Atari documents

Still working on reformatting the archive, hopefully Christian well get some time to tidy up the PDFs. Here’s the unsorted ones I extracted. I’ve contacted the original tool vendor, just in case they will help us with the recovery process.  ...
Back to school, and Atari die shots….

Back to school, and Atari die shots….

Well, summer is now over and it’s time to crack on with the FPGA work. I’m still busy repairing the last few boards, and work is well under way on the daughterboard and new production run. I’ve been chatting with a couple of guys over on atari-forum...
Server update

Server update

I’m starting the work on updating the website and servers. The developers SVN will be off line for a few moments today. /Mike

Forum down (Now fixed)

You may have noticed the forum is down. This appears to be a problem with the hosting company after an update. I have run a full back now and we are working on it …. … And it’s all ok again. Happy Friday!