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

I just got the Dreamcast that I plan to put DCIO in whenever it's available! Looking forward to the VGA-HDMI thread
Seems like you've got quite a few projects on your hands OzOnE!

 

Hi, all,

Too many projects, Zeigren.

Luckily, there are a lot of very knowledgeable and helpful people working on various things, so I'm really just the guy in the middle atm.

Remember, there's no "VGA" involved here - it'll be all-digital.
(final version may include a DAC for Component / RGB output though.)


Yep - DCIO parts were from Mouser.
The order form said they would ship from Texas, but the box said Germany (no doubt Texas is the origin though).

DCIO parts arrived today!
Might have to wait another day or two before soldering - I forgot to order some solder Flux, so harder to solder the big chips without it.

I'll see if I can solder some of the smaller parts to the first DCIO board tonight.


HDMI prototype should be here next week.
[RDC] may have time to hook his board up to his Gamecube before then too.

Not sure if the code will work already without some tweaking, but we'll know soon enough.

@FamilyGuy - do you think a half-decent upscale could be done with fairly limited memory on the FPGA?
There are only about 50KB of RAM blocks inside the chip, but we might be adding SRAM / DDR on the final version.

50KB may be enough to buffer a few lines, but not a whole frame obviously.


@angelwolf - yeah, we've been thinking about a custom flex or QSB for the other consoles' DAC chips.
A chip clamp is a very good idea though. I'm sure there are some to be found on the Web. I'll have a look in a mo, thanks!

It's not impossible to solder to the DC / Xbox1 DAC chips using Kynar, but I know what a pain it can be.
For people who haven't done much soldering, a simpler solution needs to be found.

For the GC / N64 it's easy for anyone really. The pins are quite far apart on the N64 DAC, and miles apart on the GC (with a Digital AV port).

To solder directly to the DAC in the Wii (or non Dig AV port GC) will be VERY difficult without a QSB / chip clamp though.


Anyway, I'm going off-topic again.

I should really have waited until the HDMI board is confirmed working with at least one console. lol
Please be patient guys, I'll start a new thread for that next week hopefully.

Thanks for your support though, it's a good motivator.

E-mailing cybdyn later to let him know the DCIO parts are here.

OzOnE.

 

Ermmm, LOL.

I know only the very basics of FFTs from doing some audio DSP stuff years ago, but that's about it.
@FG - we'd love to get your help on this, especially if you or anyone have done any FPGA stuff?

There are some image processing IP blocks included in Quartus which may help.
I've used some of the Colour Space Converter and scandoubler code for the older HDMI project, but we'll probably need a DDR RAM version for the more advanced features.

The idea of the board initially is to transfer a pixel-perfect unchanged image to the TV / monitor in the best possible digital quality.
Many TVs do a good job of upscaling to the panel res now, but I know that some TVs can make retro consoles look worse than a good CRT.

The good thing is, we can add upscaling and other features to later versions of the board.
It's sounding like adding a DDR RAM chip will be a good idea in the mean time though.

OzOnE.

 

Well I never touched a FPGA, so I guess I don't qualify... But I know a lot about math and fourier space... I'm not used to work with so little ram. In the exemples I've shown I treat the image as a 3D matrix really 640x480x3*32bitfloat = 3600kB ~ 3.5MB >> 50kB. Just for storing the image. While it's not accessed all a once, the whole image is needed for fourier analysis as each "pixels" of the fourier spectrum represents information on the whole picture.

It may be feasible to upscale using so little ram using linear interpolation (better than nearest neighbour) or clever convolution because it's local vs the global ffts. Afaik virtually all DSP implements FFT and/or Direct Cosine Transform efficiently.

 

OK, thanks, FG.

We'll look at adding DDR RAM in the final version then, but that will likely mean using a BGA FPGA.
I've never attempted to solder a BGA before (apart from re-flowing an Xbox 360 GPU or two).

As I say, I doubt we could do much better up-scaling than a modern TV could do anyway (not without adding a lot to the cost of the boards).

From my previous experiments, I think a pure 240p / 288p / 480i / 480p / 576i image is going to look great!

The use of a proper HDMI chip solves a whole host of issues too, and simplifies the code a fair bit.
At least we'll be sure that the HDMI output will now be fully compliant, and includes the recommended ESD filters etc.

OzOnE.

 

Sounds perfect. My interest is to transfer the signal as near to original as possible to a capture card.

 

Looking forward to DCIO and having HDMI output for a few consoles. Though I would probably pay a member here to solder the HDMI outs for me. I hope with DCIO you all do allow HDD support, whether that be from USB or IDE.

 

Soldering the HDMI board to the GC (with Dig AV port) or N64 shouldn't be too hard, but can be a tad tricky if you haven't done much soldering.
It's only about 8 to 10 wires for those consoles, so fairly quick to do.

Yep, we're hoping to add HDD / USB stick support via the USB OTG port on the DCIO.
First thing will be to get the SD card part working, then we can start on the USB devices.

Still waiting for the flux to solder the prototypes. Might turn up today hopefully.

Finally getting my "workshop" sorted as well after the slight water leak.

OzOnE.

 

WW hdmi output! uf i broke 2 dreamcast soldering diferent mods... so im a bit scared to install myself this mod, but is amazing all of this, congratulations!

 

Had to get used to soldering those little 0603 resistors and caps again. Wasn't too bad, just takes a while.

Still a way to go yet, but I'm just waiting to see what cybdyn wants me to send over to him.

I've powered up the board via USB already, and can JTAG the FPGA just fine.

I need to buy one of those ARM JTAG debugger / programmer thingies now.


More news when I have it.

OzOnE.

 

Awesome! Thanks for the update and the hard work, it's exciting to watch....

 

Cool, cant wait to see it in action. Please post a video!

 

Yeah right!

 

thanks for the update

 

I've been following this thread for a while (joined just to post on this thread lol) and I must say, excellent work guys!! I had always hoped that someone would make these sorts of things to bring the DC into modern times. Count me in for buying the HDMI and DCIO when they are ready.

 

The component count is delightfully low. Are those decoupling capacitors enough to cover both the ARM and the FPGA?

 

That looks sexy as hell and is shaping up nicely. Can't wait to see the finished product!

 

I'm sure we'll be showing a few videos as soon as it's running.

They are now....

(still some cleaning to do)...






Thanks guys, cybdyn really did a nice job on the board layout.
Not too bad at all to solder by hand.

Will be posting off parts to cybdyn tomorrow or Tuesday.
He said he's already making progress on the USB Host stuff, and I believe he already has the code for the 4-bit SD interface.


(might be OT again, but just a sneak peek of HDMI board progress)...

Work on the HDMI board has been OK, but I'll have to add a scandoubler so it will work with TVs that don't support 480i / 576i directly via HDMI (like my Samsung).
The image is looking very nice on the Gamecube at least.

Of course, it's nearly impossible to get a decent photo from a TV, especially when there are yellow Taxis whizzing around in the background. lol

Note: The screenshots below are from the GAMECUBE atm, and 576i into a slightly crappy old TV.
(I'm waiting for some blank disks to arrive to try a 480p game.)

This should give a rough idea of quality, but keep in mind this old plasma TV is barely 720p - it has a 1024x1024 ALIS panel I think (non-square pixels)...

http://i62.tinypic.com/2vaifq0.jpg
http://i57.tinypic.com/iedm9s.jpg
http://i57.tinypic.com/ab599w.jpg
http://i60.tinypic.com/snjthk.jpg

I'll be testing it on a new Celcus LED in a few hours (1080p LG panel).

DC will be nice obviously, as pretty much all of the games can run in VGA mode, correct?

OzOnE.

 

Correct, except some games (SF3.3...).

 

Thanks, zouzzz,

I heard that most games can work in VGA, but wasn't entirely sure.

I think some of them can have the flag patched in IP.BIN as well.
That sort of thing should be easy with the DCIO too, as it will be possible to patch IP.BIN while loading the GDI.

OzOnE.