As there has been interest in software development from a number of people, we’ve decided we’ll be shipping dev boards to interested developers for testing.
You’ll need skills in SDL, C, or Python, and of course Linux to be eligible for a developer board, and hopefully have an arcade machine to plug one into.
Dev boards will be limited to 10 units initially*.
I´m worthless as a coder unfortunately. That said, I´d really like to test this board as soon as there is anything to test without coding for it.
supergoose wrote:I've been waiting for something like this. Please say that it will be powerful enough to emulate mvs, cpsII and pgm. Maybe cpsIII, too?
One suggestion:
If you're going to add composite video (i'm not against it), then you could just as well ad a pair of neo geo compatible joyports as well. That way you wouldn't need a supergun to play the games on a tv.
Looks like it'll be a 1ghz Cortex A8. From a quick search I found a post on another forum saying Neo Geo and CPSII were playable while CPSIII required a dual core A9 for whatever emulator that was (although I have no clue what their reference for "playable" performance would be considering they were playing on phones and tablets afaik). (Edit for here: just saw a video of CPSIII running on an OpenPandora which has an A8, so I guess that might work too?)
Other than the emulation performance itself my main worry would be input lag (if the rest of the emulation is good enough in the first place). If it's fast enough to handle older games without noticeable lag I'd be fine with it. And I guess however long down the line newer models with A9 or A15 or whatever should be possible right?
And verging off a bit, I saw something about a scan line generator and taking up board/SoC space over in that other thread. If the GPU on it is decent enough couldn't it be done in software with an overlay/filter?
Very, very interested in this... not only about the emulation capabilities but also in the game developing side of the board. I have just starting to code a game in Allegro 5 and it would be a awesome to have it working in my cab...
Hope it comes to a reality and we can enjoy it after summer...
japtor wrote:Other than the emulation performance itself my main worry would be input lag (if the rest of the emulation is good enough in the first place). If it's fast enough to handle older games without noticeable lag I'd be fine with it. And I guess however long down the line newer models with A9 or A15 or whatever should be possible right?
Aside from the SoC being fast enough to handle lag-free emulation, I'm most interested in hearing how the JAMMA inputs are wired up. For proper lag free operation they'd need to bypass a lot of the things you'd get with PC hardware. USB HID for instance is a big no-no as it's based around polling by the USB master (implemented in the driver). I would look into a modified Linux version or some sort of bespoke driver that lets you memory map the pins on some input peripheral (I doubt the SoC itself has 20 TTL inputs), so MAME/SDL has direct access to the hardware when it polls for input, rather than having to go through a stack of input drivers.
I really like the sound an OpenJAMMA board for home-brew development.
Commercial JAMMA gaming boards do exist, the one linked is based around an AMD708e, JAMMA I/O but only VGA video out and probably costing more than £100. The JAMMA connector is there to meet gaming regulations in Italy, so the device is targeted at the gambling market.
Perhaps a group order would be possible if others are interested?
jimmerd wrote:I really like the sound an OpenJAMMA board for home-brew development.
Commercial JAMMA gaming boards do exist, the one linked is based around an AMD708e, JAMMA I/O but only VGA video out and probably costing more than £100. The JAMMA connector is there to meet gaming regulations in Italy, so the device is targeted at the gambling market.
Perhaps a group order would be possible if others are interested?
Powered via jamma. HD3200 is good for 15k in Windows. Shame if it doesn't output video on the jamma edge. It's a modification away from being very useful
jimmerd wrote:I really like the sound an OpenJAMMA board for home-brew development.
Commercial JAMMA gaming boards do exist, the one linked is based around an AMD708e, JAMMA I/O but only VGA video out and probably costing more than £100. The JAMMA connector is there to meet gaming regulations in Italy, so the device is targeted at the gambling market.
Perhaps a group order would be possible if others are interested?
