Posts tagged "sg1000"
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Halloween with the Camels
It’s time to close out this year’s RetroChallenge project. Since it’s October, why not use the Forth interpreter that I’ve been slowly building up all month to do a sort of demo? I hear decorative squash is hot this time of year.
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No longer a theoretical Camel
In theory, theory and practice are the same thing. In practice, they’re not. That’s sort of the same problem with emulators – even the best ones are not always the same as real hardware. Although MAME is very robust and useful for development, eventually you have to buckle down and get your stuff sent to a real system.
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Video Dromedary Processor
Now that we have a working Forth environment running on the SG-1000, it makes some sense to start building up the video display capabilities. Can I get sprites working on the TMS9918 for the first time in my career? Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can configure a raster.
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Cleaning up after a Camel
Now that my port of CamelForth-80 to the Sega SG-1000 is sort of working, it’s time to get it working better. There’s a lot of undone odds and ends and little bugs that I need to take care of before I can try running it on real hardware, so this week’s (abbreviated) effort was mostly along those lines.
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A Typed Forth
Now that we have a functioning Forth interpreter on the Sega SG-1000, it’s time to actually finish hooking up the keyboard input. Because I considered this task to be a little mind-numbing, I’ve put it off for years. How long do you think it took me to figure out? About an hour. One day, I’ll learn.
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More like SC-Forth-thousand, am I right?
The Soggy needed a good low-level programming environment with which to tinker on future hardware projects, and ideally it was one that I controlled myself, so I could include it on the onboard ROM without infringing copyright. It would be nice if it used a semi-popular programming language for embedded systems, and had an interactive development environment that I could run right on the machine. All that seems to mean I’m finally going to make my first Forth.
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The Soggy-1000 turns a page
For version 3 of the Soggy-1000 SG-1000 clone, I wanted to make it more useful as a general-purpose computer. Building a new keyboard is going to cost a fortune in parts, so it’s fiscally prudent to find more reasons to use said keyboard. There are only so many SG-1000 games out there, the SC-3000 software library is kind of small, and I was using only 2k of the 32k of RAM that I had on the board. These are all problems that can be solved with a suitably large application of hubris.
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Soaking it in with the SK-1100 Keyboard
If you’ve been following the Soggy-1000, my clone of the Sega SG-1000, then you know what it needs most of all is a keyboard. The original Sega SK-1100 keyboard is hard to find, but I still managed to luck out and get one at auction. Let’s plug it in and find out if it still works.
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An SG-1000 II gets a second chance
As we’ve covered before during the clone saga, the Sega SG-1000 was an unfortunate casualty of the Nintendo juggernaut. But surely the redesigned SG-1000 II would do better, right? No.
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Soggy-1000 ][
![Thumbnail for 'Soggy-1000 ]['](/thumbnails/soggy-1k-v0.2-assembled-boardshot.jpg "Thumbnail for 'Soggy-1000 ]['")
Once I got the Soggy-1000 playing SG-1000 cartridges, the next thing to do was to extend it. In this phase of the project, we’ll take that leap from “interesting” to “slightly ridiculous,” by adding the feature I’m most excited about – at least until I get excited about a different one – the SK-1100 keyboard connector.
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SG-1000 Ways To Leave Your Original
The SG-1000, being Sega’s first home console, has appreciated quite a bit over the years. Its price is now faintly ridiculous, especially when you consider its successor, the relatively inexpensive Mark III. Luckily for us, this console is made out of off-the-shelf components, virtually all of which are also found in the ColecoVision. If only we knew someone who’d cloned the ColecoVision…