Commodore 64 VIC-II 6567/6569 Replacement Project
github.com
github.com
Gideon isn't very good at advertising, so not everyone knows this even exists. It's a complete C64 emulation motherboard. You mount it into an existing C64, place the SID in a socket (for real analog SID sound) and enjoy a modernized C64 with perfect zero-delay HDMI output, great sound, 1541 drive emulation, cartridges, etc.
It still blows my mind that you can plug in a USB stick containing every C64 game ever written.
This thing is really impressive and after you've used it for a while, it's actually hard to go back to the "real" C64 motherboard :-)
Implementing all this on an FPGA is a mind-boggling feat, and I have nothing but the highest respect for Gideon.
He's so bad at it that I thought none of the Ultimate64 was open source hardware.
But most if not all of it is.
There are also replacement C64C cases, mechanical keyboards and at least two SID-chip replacements based on ARM-based MCUs available. ARMSID is the most well known of the SID boards (I forget the other one)
This reminds me of a friend who had every Atari 2600 game ever written on a 3.5" floppy...
Stuff like this looks almost superhuman to me and I would like to know how one can get the abilities to pull this off.
It did not go as far as being worthy enough to be published, but it worked.
It is not particularly superhuman, me not having any degrees or related work, just some years playing with electronics as a hobby, then taking old IBM EGA manual and designing the thing in a couple of evenings.
It's not rocket science :) However nowadays even rocket science isn't.
Everything is pretty simple, especially if you throw sufficiently large FPGAs on the problem.
(I got as far as building my own HDMI-outputting simple video chip with a character generator, tied to a RISC-V processor, addressing SRAM, booting a primitive OS. But I kinda fizzled out after that when I ran into SD card interfacing)
The hardest part for people coming from the software angle is that you tell an FPGA what to be, not what to do.
Software guy. SWE background. Mostly unrelated fields though we did both work at Google in the Nest division with embedded LInux stuff, but on the software. No degree in electronics, taught himself the hardware end of things and the FPGA end of things.
Not superhuman. Just really passionate about the C64. You can do it, too.
It's hard to comprehend why Commodore was making these even past A1200 and CD32 releases.
Also, I think it is a brilliant idea to have included DVI/HDMI output for this chip -- which didn't support it in its original incarnation; i.e., DVI/HDMI didn't exist in the 1980's...