Mike Tsao geeks out.

Board sent off to the factory

No, not the replacement for the Mess O’ Wires. This is the Dangerous Prototypes XC9500XL CPLD Breakout Board. I’ve ordered from DorkbotPDX, and my batch should be going to the fab today. (As a side note, I don’t feel too bad about depriving DP of revenue. I own one of approximately every other thing they’ve sold, and I couldn’t wait for the many-week shipment time from SeeedStudio.)

As I investigate (naively) the capabilities of this device, I’m pretty sure I ought to be able to duplicate all of Joust with the following:

• A Xilinx Spartan of some kind to reproduce the main chips (6809E, two 6821s, a 6808 for sound, and the “special” SC2) and a lot of the glue among them.
• One of these little CPLDs for things like the Q/E clock generator and other glue that might not fit on the Spartan. (Actually, I doubt it’ll be necessary at all, but I’m rationalizing it now so I can start working on programmable logic before the Spartan arrives.)
• An SRAM.
• An EEPROM to hold the game code.
• The 4MHz oscillator.
• An ATmega of some kind to load up the Spartan and maybe manage resets.
• A bunch of resistors for video, and capacitors for power decoupling.

Unless I’m missing something major, this will be a pretty tiny board, compared to the original five Joust boards!