New Stuff For Old Stuff :: Blog

B ehold, the Versa-Tile: It's not just a solder-it-yourself Simon.   It could be:  - a self-contained electronic game  - an electronic game driven by a computer  - a versatile and interesting controller for your game   Technically, it’s an Interface between your computer / microcontroller and a set of buttons and coloured lights. ie a ‘driver’ and multiplexer for a set of lights and buttons, with all necessary buffering and protection. Drive up to 7 LEDs / speaker / buzzer and/or listen to up to 5 buttons using just 3 input and 3 output lines, 5v or 3.3v The reason for this multiplexing is that I wanted to create electronic games, driven by a Commodore, which has a user port containing 8 lines, (can be set individually to input or output). That's not quite enough for the five buttons, five lights and vibrator that you can see in the video. It's also useful if your  project is already using connections for other things and GPIO lines are limited. Or if you just want to keep

T his is an ARM2SID in my sixtyclone: Before now, I didn't appreciate that the ARM2SID is two ARMSIDs in one package. You might guess that from the name, but most of the pictures show two of them hooked together which gave me the incorrect impression that you needed two. Having two of these connected together actually gives you 3-SID sound and FM Sound Expander capability.  At first, I fitted a single ARMSID into my sixtyclone. It has a very good sound, is configurable for 6581 / 8580 and supports paddles.  For dual-SID work, I first tried the SID2SID board. It's cheap and easy to install, doesn't overhang any chips and works fine with two ARMSIDs. The drawback to this is that the second SID sits at either DE00 or DF00 and that's it. So for more configurability I tried a MIXSID. This gives you loads of configurability (ie option of having second SID at D420) and also allows you to mix the stereo.  A drawback to this solution is the size of it. I had to use an extra sock