C64 GRAPHICS CARD

From: Hatch (hatch_at_in.com.au)
Date: 2004-10-31 11:45:29

I have started a discussion on this subject at CSDb coding forum titled "faster 3d graphics" but would like to hear other peoples opinions and ideas on the subject.

As part of the final semester in the Electronics Engineering advanced diploma coarse I am doing we have to design a project the uses an 8051 microcontroller.  I decided to make my project a small 8bit computer (games console).  Basically it's an 8051 with a joystick and a graphics cct I designed.   The graphics cct is very low spec, I first designed it with 74ls components and a couple of GAL chips, the cct has since been moved to a Xilinx CPLD chip.  Now that I have almost finished the semester I would like to look at interfacing my cct to the C64,  I have several ideas and a few different paths I could go down so that is why I'm asking you fellows for help.

One thing I would like to do when I redesign the cct is to give it a way to address graphics data so that 3D graphics can be calculated quicker (basically something other the 8x8 cells) either 200 rows of 40 bytes (horizontally formatted) or 40 columns of 200 bytes (vertically formatted).  This way my cct will be useful for something.  At the Moment I'm leaning towards horizontal formatting (but it's a question of which ever way is faster for calculating 3D graphics with).  Some other questions are:
* 1 byte per pixel or bit plan (1 to 8 bit plans)
* use C64 memory (with large buffers in graphics card) or another bank of 64k (which allows 6510 to access 64k of graphics card memory)
*and probably many other questions

I know next to nothing about 3D graphics and would appreciate any help I can get with deciding which way to go with designing this cct, also if anyone has any cool ideas for the cct please let me know.  One thing that must be said that at least for the moment I would like to keep the cct as simple as possible, It has taken a lot of hours (I mean a lot) to design the simple cct I have at the moment and I will be fitting this project in between work and study.




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