You Hear Somethin?

1st signs of audio life.  Still need to work out the discrete sounds but here are some speech samples recorded directly from the FPGAArcade Replay board running a reduced PPClone.

http://www.onecircuit.com/sites/onecircuit.com/files/temp/ppclone_111914.mp3

Test Screen on the Replay

After pulling out the Z8002 cores and all the road+car video logic I was able to get the design to fit into the Replay's FPGA and get to the self test screen.  (finally... sheesh)

Now to get the joystick connected up and try the audio hardware...

Time to trim the fat

So I've realized real quick that the PPClone design will simply not fit into the Replay board as-is.
Looking at the ROM list (http://www.mamedb.com/game/poleposa), there's 168kB worth of ROM info to store (nevermind the ram).  The Spartan-3E on the Replay only has enough room for 73kB.  So something's gotta go or I need to abandon the Spartan-3E.  I hate to do that since it's so attractive from a pricing standpoint so I'm looking at the ROM contents themselves to see if any savings can be made.  (large portions of memory with the same patterns in them)

Another possibility would be to store them in external RAM but I'm not sure if I can get the data to the subunits in a timely fashon.  We'll see....

PPClone update on Arcade Outsiders podcast

Last week I sat in on the Arcade Outsiders podcast for a quick interview and update on the PPClone.


Catch the full episode here: http://arcadeoutsiders.com/