Philips videopac / Magnavox Odyssey2 for the MiST FPGA

Image by Evan-Amos

After some bug hunting and an unsuccessful attempt to get a screen output from a new core I looked for an easy port to get something done. As usual I found something in the huge pacedev archive and on the fpgaarcade page: Arnim Laeuger’s implementation of a Videopac console.
It still needs some finishing but overall it works fine.

There’s no binary release yet but if you wanna try it you can compile it from the sources at:
https://github.com/wsoltys/mist-cores/tree/master/fpga_videopac

New vic20 update

And again a small vic20 core update.
Changes:

used bugfixed T65 core from the bbc micro project.
auto reset when changing the memory configuration
switched internal joystick port

Now the core works with only one usb joystick attached.
With the bugfixed cpu core more games work including Dark Dungeons which didn’t run before.

vic20 update

Another update for the vic20. The 16K expansion can now be disabled and I added a 3K expansion. There’s no lock to prevent enabling both ram expansion but I think that doesn’t work (but I have no idea how the real hardware would have handled it).
At least unexpanded and 3K games seems to work now but I still see problems with some basic games. They just stop sometimes with a type mismatch or similar. Anyone has an idea what that could be?

vic20 for the MiST released (part 5)

Finally I got some issues ironed out and most games work fine. The port accepts prg uploads for expanded vics and rom cartridges with the auto start sequence. The often as .a0 seen roms needs to be renamed to .prg and the program type in the osd needs to be set to rom.
The vic20 has a 16kb ram expansion in block1 and block2.
Due to the different memory layouts between an unexpanded and an expanded vic currently only games for expanded vics will work. There’re still some glitches on some games but in general it works pretty well. Below some impressions of the core: