nesdev.org

Since I just finished building revision B of the project design, I threw together an assembly video. It covers the whole process, start-to-finish. Hopefully its decent:
https://youtu.be/UlO0NQTAaJU

If anyone is interested in following along with the actual development, the entire project (code + schematics) has recently been moved up to GitHub:
https://github.com/dkonigsberg/nestronic

I originally thought the DMC start address could be set so I could wrap around and begin at $8000. But upon double-checking, it seems that's not the case. Thanks for making me double-check. That being said, I can still mirror my SRAM to $C000-$DFFF and hopefully be okay. My VGM player code is going ...

My memory map couldn't support the address ranges used by the NES APU's DMC output, which a handful of games apparently use Oh. Yeah. Oops. I wonder what the simplest way is to remap the RAM to available to hold DPCM for the DMA unit to handle. I'd be tempted to split the 8K into two 4K windows, di...

Finally finished writing the next blog post, which covers the assembly and testing of the main board for the first real prototype: Building the Nestronic Prototype (Part 3) http://hecgeek.blogspot.com/2018/05/nestronic-3.html (Maybe someday I'll blog without a multi-week lag before doing something a...

And now with the rest of the enclosure put together:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXp97wzkQEE

Just finished getting the first prototype PCB assembled and mounted in a half-enclosure. Here's a video of it in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izMFPKmD5ZU

The next blog post is ready: Nestronic System Architecture This post details the architecture of the system, and shows all the circuit schematics. As far as actual development goes, PCB layout is mostly complete and I've begin to work on the design of the enclosure. Once I have a bit more certainty ...

The only really big difference I see between my board and yours is that I more aggressively made ground/power supply rails into a "plane", by connecting the +5V and ground rails at both top and bottom. (Yes that causes ground/power supply loops, no it seemed to have worked out) My design ...

I didn't actually have problems with assembling my (8051-based) college final microcontroller project class on two of those breadboards ... but it was a brand-new one purchased just for the project. Most of these were brand-new too. :-) Of course its often hard to determine which breadboards are &q...

As I continue to work on this project, I decided to go ahead and start writing blog posts to describe it in more detail. Here's the first post: Introducing the Nestronic! (Part 1) This blog post mostly covers what I already said in my first post on this forum thread, but goes into a lot more detail....

Something I'd think would be fun from a musical point of view, although not particularly useful from the point of view of replaying existing soundtracks, is using some kind of reconfigurable clock generator to choose what frequency the 2A03 runs at. This is an idea that has never occurred to me, bu...

As far as VGM consuming too much memory, I'd think you should be able to build a message-passing loop between the 2A03 and the ESP32 ... I know its probably lost in the middle of my attempt at writing a "brief" post, but this is actually exactly what I did. I only tried cramming data into...

So there's this little project I've been working on for the past few weeks, which I think is at a good stage to start showing off. Its still very much a work-in-progress, but the most critical components are now working. What I'm building is a contraption that can play NES game music using an authen...