"Let's make GD ROM emulation happen" Facebook group.

Now I'm officially drooling

 

i know that the parts had arrived to my country 13.04. will hope it doesnt take more than week for check them by customs service

 

Wow good luck on your programming. Are you far in code development or were you waiting for the board to start developing?

 

not far. but process of developing will spin quicker on the real HW

 

Of course. I haven't followed the thing from start. What FPGA are you planing to use? VHDL or Verilog? If you ever feel like a second helper would be good for you I could help. This project is really interesting. I have some experience in high speed system design using FPGAs and CPLDs.

I also planned on modding my Dreamcast, I think I'll put it on ice for now seeing how this is going!

Good luck anyway.

 

FPGA - cyclone 3 (ep3c5e144) , AHDL . for mcu and win apps - C language. also some program for SH4 will be helpful for test/debug.

 

Haven't been here in a while.

I miss anything of note?

Don't look like it yet.

Still waiting since I seem to be the one who brought the idea out from the dark recesses of the net...

Surprised at how popular this got after this thread was started.

 

i got all parts and psio pcb's, soon i'll give them new life)))

 

Once this project is done would be cool.

 

We all wait with great anticipation! :smile-new:
And thank you for the effort you are putting into this project.
Here's hoping it beams to life! :topsy_turvy:

 

to be done this project it's still to go long road)))

who does like solder parts yourself here? i almost broke my eyes of 0603 res & caps)))

 

Those things are so small. I don't think I'd like doing work THAT small! So tiny! :concern:

 

did you try a maganifer on a flexible stand?

 

Yeah a binocular/magnifier clearly can help there. Even if your hand is the most stable in the West (or East), if you can't see it's almost impossible!

 

We have some video microscopes at work - if you zoom right in, a single 0402 footprint pretty much fills the entire screen - this is also the point where you discover that even if you never thought that your hands shake, they do really... I don't think anyone can hand solder 0201s though, they are just too small. It's also quite amusing that I used to think that 0805s were tiny - but they seem huge now.

 

If you stabilize both of your forearms by laying them flat on a table and hold your working hand with your second hand, you can be pretty stable even for really really small stuff. I do this with tweezers to remove failed wedge bonding residual wires, way smaller than any footprint I ever seen, and it greatly reduces your shaking. A binocular also helps a LOT to stabilize your movement, and you get instant visual feedback on your movement, while without binoculars it'd have been unnoticeable. Sometimes it's almost like if you "think about moving a little" and the hand moves a little.

Of course don't drink Coffee if you plan to do that ...

 

i soldered well , but it's very annoying... especially in case if i need do few pcb or more. so i better chk Assembling option. let it better will be made automatically )))

 

Cool device you chose. But I ask myself why do you use AHDL and not VHDL/Verilog? Then you would have far less trouble porting the project to a FPGA from a competitor like Xilinx or Actel. Still it looks fairly familiar compared to VHDL, it doesn't look like the learning curve would be that big.

I consider myself as a really good solderer. I can sucesfully solder TQFP-100 chips (like the Xilinx XC2C256) under 10 minutes, no shorts. Same goes for Xbox ram chips which are another variant of QFP-100, about the same pitch as the XC2C256. I like a challenge and I feel confident I could solder that Cyclone3 LQFP-144.

 

Hmm RAM I can do OK... but a 100-pin QFP for some reason decided to throw blue sparks out everywhere for me! :topsy_turvy:
I'm going to give you some respect points for that! :smile-new:

 

I've always liked the solder blob approach - just tack the device down using a few pins, flood the pins down each side with solder and then wick it off. The idea of soldering a fine pitch QFP with a 1/4" chisel bit might seem a little counter-intuitive, but it actually works really well. Good quality solder wick is essential, though.