Going forward (Patreon)

Hi everyone,

as promissed in the last post, I will cover the progress for the new system. I'm still working on the software emulator and that will be the case for maybe another 2 months or so, but I still want to tell you more about the status.

3 weeks ago I had some very simple graphics output working, together with basic CPU functionality and Memory access. But thanks to the possiblity to run homebrew and my own test programs, I could work on several parts much better:

- Many CPU subfunctions are now implemented, but not validated yet. Status 50%

- Graphics subsystem also got some new functions implemented, but is still missing many, Status 20%

- Memory access seems working for now, but that's of course easier for software than a FPGA core, Status 80%

- 1 new component for support functions could be implemented and validated to a good degree, 70% done

- video timing is a hack, but good enough for the software emulator for now

- completely missing: sound, input, saving and 2 other components

Overall I have a list of roughly 400 tests for all the different components and about 50% of them are already working, which is a good sign. My plan is to bring that to about 80% and then try to get the first game running. At the current point there is just too much missing to try it.

Next steps are always hard to tell after that. For PSX I started with FPGA work when some games worked until ingame and this could also be a plan here.

Now what do you see on the image above?

It's a mathematical function generating this image. This functions depends on one of the new components to support. It's just a small demo, but it must calculate exact results for several million calculations, so it's a good test against the real hardware.

It's all not that exciting yet, but so is the early development. The fun always starts when the first game boots up :)