Scores

Had a bit of time to work on this recently... I emulated the BCD to 7 segment decoder, and hooked up some of the related circuitry, which allowed the scores to be displayed. I also rewrote the some of the video code to only update the screen when something changes, instead of on every pixel, which made it a bit faster.

Video

Finally got around to hooking up the video... Here is the first screen shot of the simulator in action. So far the "net" circuit has been emulated. It may not look like much, but that one tiny line requires the simulation of about a dozen different chips, timing circuits, hsync and vsync, and so on.

Things should be pretty straightforward from here, just a few more chips to simulate, and then hooking everything together. The hardest part will be emulating the 555 timers that are used for the paddles and a few other places... Hopefully I'll be able to finish this up sometime in the next few months :)

A little progress

Haven't had a whole lot of time to work on this lately... I managed to rewrite and reorganize most of the code, it's a lot cleaner now, but unfortunately about 10% slower... I also added some nice logging functions which should make debugging a lot easier. Still haven't gotten around to hooking up the video yet, hopefully I'll be able to do that soon.

Current Project

The project I am currently working on is a discrete logic simulator, for old arcade games without a CPU. It works by simulating each logic chip on the board individually. It's been done before, but I wanted to see if the simulation speed couldn't be improved a bit. How much faster? I don't know yet... initial tests look promising, but there's still a long way to go.

The first game to be simulated will be Pong (of course). So far a few of the basic timing circuits have been simulated. Next I'm going to work on hooking up the video and simulating the rest... stay tuned!

first post

just making sure this damn thing works properly...