FPGA replacment for the ZX8301 ULA and more

[Derek_Stewart]

Hi,

Truely marvelous, the video demonstration, makes the QL into a wonderful machine.

Looks like another hardware, that I want.

[lliont]

I added some things, one is implementation of the ym2149 sound ic and made a simple .ym file player

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1n5nT7T ... 2Lg-G/view

another is that I made utilities for reading the directory and coping files from/to the win drive image to/from the fat file system of the sd card .

[Chris_68]

Great! File handling and music!!

[Maskenlos]

Hi Leon,

any plans to make it on one or the other way available to the community?

Stephan

[lliont]

Hi yes, I made 3 for friends already.
After the summer I can make more.

[martyn_hill]

Dear Leon

May I please be added to your list of friends?

[lliont]

Of course, one for you

[Peter]

I added some things, one is implementation of the ym2149 sound ic and made a simple .ym file player

Seems like you repeated what I did in 2018 for an experimental Q68 version. YM seemed more 68K style to me than AY.
Playing melodies worked fine, but I had small problems with the noise generator, so never released it.
My YM player seems to have a few more features than yours, maybe I could adapt it, time permitting.

Which FPGA core are you using for YM? And under which license is it released?

[bwinkel67]

I had a few question here. I've followed this forum thread on and off and now, coming back to it there's a lot to take in. I realize this is Leon's thread to share what cool work his been doing and get feedback on his CPLD replacement for the ZX8301 and related work -- all fantastic stuff.

I'm a bit lost at the moment though. It seems like there are three different projects here:

1. ZX8301 replacement that adds some features like extra color (on hackaday site)
2. Pure ZX8301 replacement / smaller board (not sure if this was a one off that a few got to test)
3. Gold Card equivalent running at 4x with extra color and sound using the expansion port and ZX8301 socket

With item 1, last I looked, I thought the aim was to reduce its size, but it seems to have settled on the current form factor. Not saying it's too big, but I thought I saw one that was about 30% smaller (page 11 of the thread) and I guess I assumed the final goal was to make it closer to the ZX8301 form factor -- maybe that's impossible/impractical.

Perhaps I confused item 1 with item 2 (page 15 of thread), which looks to be that smaller board. Re-reading the thread, it seems that was a base ZX8301 replacement with no bells, which would be very useful as Peter suggested.

Item 3 was the one that surprised me as I kept thinking these were features added to the single small board, only to realize it has exploded into a full featured dual circuit board accelerator.

Can you currently build one of these on your own? If so, then is the kackaday one the only one you can build yourself (i.e. is all the information there)? Will the other two items also eventually be published so they can be reproduced?

Also, is there a plan, similar to Peter, to have someone else build some of these for sale to the QL community. I know Peter doesn't do that himself and not for everything (i.e. I don't think QZero is available for instance), but he has released awesome things like Q68, QIMSI (now defunct), and QIMSI Gold (plus a ton of others before I joined the forum).

[lliont]

Which FPGA core are you using for YM? And under which license is it released?

My simple player supports uncompressed, interleaved and not interleaved version 5 and 6 .ym files (for now).
It takes the ym frequency used by the hardware as optional parameter.

The core I used is Copyright (c) MikeJ - Jan 2005

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My 2 sound channels can work in parallel with the ym ic