EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
Electronics => Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff => Topic started by: mike2156 on February 17, 2015, 08:05:55 pm
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I've been following a forum post on sega-16.com for some time now.
Jorge Nuno is undertaking a project to bring the retro beauty that is the Mega Drive into the modern era by hacking the graphics chip, intercepting the colour channels and running them through an adc circuit.
http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?13780-Genesis-does!-1080p/page4 (http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?13780-Genesis-does!-1080p/page4)
I feel like he's perhaps lost steam on the project and wondered if anyone here had any thoughts on this project as it would be a fantastic thing to get working.
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If he's gone to composite video sampling, that's sad. Products already exist to do that (minus the neat integer upscaling + windowboxing)
I have not opened up my megadrive before, but I a bevel-cut pcb could be a great way to attach to the 60 odd digital lines if he is still worried about that being a pain. ala what bunnie Huang did when hacking the xbox (http://bunniefoo.com/nostarch/HackingTheXbox_Free.pdf).
(https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/sega-mega-drivegenesis-in-native-1080p/?action=dlattach;attach=137046)
The "Bunnie Bevel"
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Yup, if he's just building a standard (Grainy ass composite) up scaler that's no better than all of the other boxes out there, I'd like to see a real hard mod that takes the raw data from the processor and natively scales it to 1080p. essentially replacing the encoder chip.
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Seems to me, there should be enough documentation out there to implement the original chip, on the pin level, in an FPGA, with whatever output tricks you like ('nearest' upscaling, bilinear filter, palette tweaks, etc.). Substitute would then be little more than a plug-in board and replacement DIP socket.
Tim
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Seems to me, there should be enough documentation out there to implement the original chip, on the pin level, in an FPGA, with whatever output tricks you like ('nearest' upscaling, bilinear filter, palette tweaks, etc.). Substitute would then be little more than a plug-in board and replacement DIP socket.
Tim
There have been projects like this but it's a huge amount of work to get compatibility good enough. This was hardware that was misused/abused for interesting effects, even software emulation took a long time to get to the stage where all available code would run correctly.