Denial

Hey man, let's lighten this up a bit! The enemy is the modern PC, not any of us VIC users. Besides, real hackers don't worry about expansion port problems, we find a way around them... http://lucidscience.com/temp/VPORT1.jpg http://lucidscience.com/temp/VPORT2.jpg http://lucidscience.com/temp/VPORT3...

Well thanks! To me it just seemed like a bunch of simple logic that grew and grew. None of the chips are complex, just 74HC gates. A lot of what I am doing on VGER-20 is based on what I learned doing the huge breadboards. Here are some vids of the giant board during early development... https://i.yt...

Last week a 74HC245 was the warmest thing on the bench. I wired up a row of them, hit the power , then went upstairs to get more java. When I returned, the room was full of that all to familiar smell... BBQ Chips! Full power reversal for 10 minutes, and it was still cooking thanks to my 2.5 amp 5 vo...

Lately, there have been only weather extremes around here as well. I took this photo last summer... http://atomiczombie.com/temp/AtomicMeltDown.jpg Yep, that reading is 118 F degrees. My satellite outpost was almost in meltdown mode. Compared to this morning, that's more than 80 degrees difference! ...

I think I know why I have never seen a bad VIC-20 IC in all my time using a VIC (and that's a fair amount of flight time). It's because the chips are mainly damaged by heat, which is something I do not have a surplus of. Took this on my way to work this morning... http://lucidscience.com/temp/HeatWa...

Thanks. That's just the video half. The Audio Board is a bit larger, and is starting to outgrow the board. I may need to add a 3rd board of this size when the project is completed! The longest wire on the board is now 16 inches, and carries a 20MHz signal. Brad My goodness, this is by far the most c...

The clock fine tune is marked C35 in the PAL schematic I looked at... http://lucidscience.com/temp/6561.jpg This is a variable capacitor, not a variable resistor like the other ones you adjusted. Most likely, it also has some form of loctite on the top to avoid being turned easily. Before you try tw...

Man Cave time has been limited lately, so I took some time to work on the Schematic and Hardware design. After adding the component models to the 3D, I was able to shave a lot of size of the unit, and remove the section the wrapped around the back of the VIC-20 case. Here is the new layout with most...

Looks great, cheers!
Which PCB CAD do you use?

Brad

Ah, horizontal lines! For some reason I was thinking vertical lines. I wonder if your 4.436MHz color carrier is off a bit? In PAL, every second scan line has the color phase inverted as an attempt to reduce errors. Seems you are getting one good scanline, and one bad one. I only have NTSC VICs, but ...

So far it looks like all of the GPU Commands are working as expected. I still have to add all the rotations for the Sprite Commands, and test my Bresenham line draw. 4 Channel sound has also been added, but I need access to an external memory source to fully test the Sound Commands since they work w...

Can you post a photo of the video anomaly? Just curious. I have 3 restored VICs (all new caps), and on one of them, I have to tweak the phase on my monitor or there are serious vertical lines on certain colors due to the banding effect of the monitor. The effect of banding on a color like light blue...

Are you running this on a glass tube CRT or LCD monitor? The reason I ask is because some LCD systems will put a very noticeable banding across your video, depending on how the auto-adjust first calculates the pixel clock and phase for the source. If it is a modern LCD, try tweaking the pixel clock ...

I put down a 20MHz clock so I could work in multiples of the 800x600 VGA standard (40MHz). I also ripped up the LEDs to get more IO lines. VGER-20 is using 90 IO lines... all of them! It's been a great board so far. A little slow on loading time with a full SLX9, but reliable. When I do my own PCB, ...

Thanks, and Happy 7E2 to everyone here. It's more trial and error + stubbornness than some innate ability, but it gets the job done! I think the parallel lines in the breadboard act as capacitors, so it' kind of a built in feature. Sometimes this works for you, some times against you. That massive ...