Gigatron Hackers

Cool, thanks at67! I'll give it a shot to see if it fits.

Minor update on this. I missed the 11/30 shuttle. I was dependent on OpenRAM to generate the 64kx16 "ROM" and 64kx8 RAM for the design, but unfortunately they are still ironing out bugs and OpenRAM was not working at the time that the shuttle was launched. I tried to implement it in DFFs a...

Marcel had originally designed the Gigatron to support a 74LS244 which would be a drop in replacement for the 74HC595 IC to do the same thing being proposed above. The software doesn't even have to be modified to support sampling the 8 (parallel) push-buttons as long as you adhere to the same order ...

The NRE goes up exponentially with smaller nodes, but the older nodes are still reasonably cost effective. Regretfully, I never did get very far with this. While I do have a working prototype on FPGA, and got the OpenLANE toolchain installed, things suddenly got a lot busier at work starting August....

Walter, would you happen to still have the gerbers for the 4-layer variant of the PCB? Thanks!

I believe OSHPark makes you PCBs in any color, as long as it's purple.

... I found a 10-pin R2R 10K network on eBay which I believe will work by cutting off the extra 4 pins (7-10). I suspect that won't work since the last 2 pins are wired differently from the rest of the SIP. I also built one a while back out of discrete SMT resistors because I couldn't think of a be...

I gotta say, that black PCB looks really sharp!

Thanks much to both of you for the information. Makes sense now.

Amazing how much you squeezed out of the Gigatron! I spent more time than I care to admit playing this today. I did notice an anomaly playing with keyboard that I'm trying to make sense of. If you fire using the enter key, the player shifts a little to the right with each shot, which doesn't happen ...