Hey all !!
Current Status....
The video hardware and CPU side of the world is basically complete, the hardware supports the 8088 Mylstar board and the earlier Reactor style of board.
Like the WSF board the soundboard hardware is emulated in a micro-controller.
The version 1 soundboard, aka. system 80 soundboard is done and 'most' of the version 2 soundboard. This is really needed for Screwloose support. The version 2 is the System 80B style sound board which features two 6502s, 2 x AY-3-8192's, 1 x SP0256 speech IC and an 8 bit DAC with volume control. In an ideal world I'll get that part of the system finished so I can support screwloose. In just the last week some new parts arrived that I can spend some quality time working with.
The emulation of the soundboard was changed from an Atmel based controller to a PIC32 which has way more horsepower for the same price. The downside was I needed to write a new 6502 emulator for a MIPS core. But currently sound emulation is spot on and you can't tell the difference from the original board. I'll put some samples up at some point.
I've spent too much time messing with the SC-01 speech IC working on emulating its behavior and that's still not completed. Be nice if the fliter was documented
The other thing I've been playing with is having it load the ROMs from SD card. I've got the test MSF board hooked to an SD so it can read the game ROMs from card and run them that way. So if you don't want a specific game just don't put the ROMs on the card.
Overall lots of little things add time and I get distracted easily…
As a few folks have asked YES it absolutely will have Knocker support and yes it will have cocktail Qubes support.
So it's still a work in progress and will be finished in 2010.
- James