Twilighte card & sittler card (sdcard/joysticks/mouse)

This is the right place to discuss on how to implement hardware vsync, adding a VIA or AY chipset, puting multiple roms, or how to design a new flash expansion card.
jede
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Re: Twilighte card & sittler card (sdcard/joysticks/mouse)

Post by jede »

ibisum wrote: Sat Jul 11, 2020 11:46 am Cool. Now we need the same thing for Telestrat (Other Orics) ...
What do you mean by "Same thing for telestrat". Hardware is already available on telestrat. Except ram/rom switch and in system cardridge programmation. The hardware is called "Oric HD" and we can start floppy disk with telestrat :
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ibisum
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Re: Twilighte card & sittler card (sdcard/joysticks/mouse)

Post by ibisum »

What I meant was, use a Telestrat to serve files to a bunch of Atmos' .. ;)
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Re: Twilighte card & sittler card (sdcard/joysticks/mouse)

Post by jede »

ibisum wrote: Thu Jul 16, 2020 2:52 pm What I meant was, use a Telestrat to serve files to a bunch of Atmos' .. ;)
In that case, it will require some work.

And, i don't know if it will be useful to have this :) If you can show me an event where there is 2 oric runnning in the same room from differents peoples :)
At coding party, i am often alone with my Oric. And at CEO meeting, we have sometimes, two orics running at the same time :)

Anyway, there is already a lot of functionnalities on the card to play with :)
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Re: Twilighte card & sittler card (sdcard/joysticks/mouse)

Post by ibisum »

I'm planning an exhibit here in Vienna in two weeks that will have 2 Oric's involved.

But that's not really the point. What matters is if we CAN, not if we should. ;)
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Re: Twilighte card & sittler card (sdcard/joysticks/mouse)

Post by jede »

Twilighte board manage an usb port, if you code the 6502 driver on orix, you can handle a lot of usb devices. It require a bit of work.

Cool if you can be in a meeting where there is more than one Oric :)
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Re: Twilighte card & sittler card (sdcard/joysticks/mouse)

Post by mmu_man »

Wow, looks like I missed quite a lot here…

That's quite impressive, and not unlike what I had in my own project pile… btw I couldn't find the schematics on the site, did I miss something?

I'd like to build from that, and integrate the amplibus and other hw as well. And I already have some ideas for a box on where to put these (actually two, one very cheap and one much less).
Dbug wrote: Fri Jul 10, 2020 8:09 am By the way, I was thinking of your video on the CEO meet where you said that joystick support was done by tricking out the keyboard handler in ROM calls, and I wondered how these old programmable joystick interfaces actually worked: I had one with a large PCB with cables you could connect between the 5 pins of the joystick and other pins representing the various keyboard characters, and somewhat that worked magically, but on a hardware point of view I've no idea how that work: It's on the bus, it does not conflict with the actual keyboard, but pretend to be another keyboard? Is that something you could do with your extension, like pretending to press keys in hardware (so that would work with all games) ?
I have yet another joystick adapter here, it's programmable, you had to flip a switch, do each move on the joystick while pressing the corresponding key to have it learn, then flip the switch back. It of course forgot on power down so you had to teach it every time.

I opened it again yesterday and checked the few chips. It's actually much simpler than I thought :
  • 2 * SN74LS367 (Hex Buffer Tri-State)
  • 2 * N82S129N (1Kbit TTL bipolar PROM, 256*4bit)
  • M58725P (2kB static RAM)
  • 16 * 2200 ohm resistors
  • 2 other resistors, 2 caps and 1 diode.
At least 3 bits of one of the PROMs go to the address bits of SRAM.
The joystick input goes to more address bits on the SRAM.
I think it uses the PROM to implement address decoding to snoop the VIA and PSG accesses, assert IOCONTROL and the SRAM chip enable, and then the SRAM sends whatever data was found on the data bus when learning for the same joystick move.
There must probably be some state machine because of how the keyboard is addressed through the PSG, but it's much simpler than I thought.

I'll be taking photos of the PCB to try and reverse-engineer it some more in a separate thread.

As for the "wire yourself" one, I guess it just replicates the keyboard matrix, snoops the column and row accesses on the bus and just replaces them.

One interesting thing with this kind of design is the SRAM could possibly be dumped and restored, maybe even auto-loaded when selecting some TAP or DSK if we had an integrated device.

Also, since the joystick input is taken as binary in the SRAM addresses, it means it can handle diagonals and move+fire as separate keys, unlike if it just mapped each direction to a key.

Update: from the picture it's the Downsway one.
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Re: Twilighte card & sittler card (sdcard/joysticks/mouse)

Post by mmu_man »

I wanted to start drawing the schematics and reinstalled KiCAD, but I had the brilliant idea of trying to install kicad-packages3d which takes 5GB when I only had 2GB free in the root partition… so I took 2 hours to clean this mess up. I'll have a look tomorrow.
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