The Idea Oubliette

Intro  Of all the projects I've ever conceived, the Jamestation is the most complex. I've never put any work into it other than learning and ideation, but there's plenty I'd need to do to see it through, most of which is currently beyond me. It started from conversations with a co-worker a couple of years before COVID hit, and the name is a play on Playstation and my name. Concept  The idea behind the Jamestation is to make a game console based loosely on tech available when the original Playstation came out. 32-bit processor, small amount of RAM, that sort of thing. There'd need to be some sort of physical media to give it the flavour of that era of console, probably something NFC based, since who wants to have a spinning media like a CD, or a physical cartridge interface that'd cost quite a bit to implement? I'd implement a lot of components, but I'd make use of off-the-shelf bits when appropriate. In an ideal world it could be productized and made f...

I've been working my way through the nand2tetris book, and am at the point where you pull everything together into a working computer. I got distracted and haven't had the chance to come back to it. But I had plans… Once I'd finished the CPU design I was going to implement it in Verilog  for the DE10 nano . The idea was to output the design's screen to a texture that Linux running on the ARM SoC could put into a window. I'd actually started on the Verilog for different components of the system, although that was just to complete the lessons, using someone else's Verilog of the different chips as a base, and improved on their designs. They were using too many gates for their adder, I believe, among other inefficiencies. I'm a neophyte at FPGA design, but I realized that implementing all the multiplexers and RAM using NAND gates directly was going to under-perform. Not that the design needs the full 50 MHz offered by the board, but it's the principle of t...