How it got started
My name is Sérgio Vieira and I’m a Portuguese guy who grew up in the 80s and 90s, I’ve always been nostalgic towards retro-gaming, specifically the third and forth generation consoles. A few years ago I’ve decided to learn more about electronics and try to build my own video game console.
Professionally I work as a software engineer and had no experience with electronics other than occasionally building and upgrading my desktop computer (which doesn’t really count). Even though I had no experience, I said to myself “why not?”, bought a few books, a few electronics kits and started to learn what I felt I needed to learn.
I wanted to build a console that would be similar to those which are nostalgic to me, I wanted something between an NES and a Super Nintendo or between a Sega Master System and a Mega Drive. These video game consoles had a CPU, a custom video chip (in those days it wasn’t called a GPU) and an audio chip either integrated or separate. Games were distributed in cartridges, which were basically hardware extensions with a ROM chip and sometimes other components as well.
The initial plan was to build a console with the following characteristics:
- No emulation, the games/programs had to run on real hardware, not necessarily hardware of the time, but hardware that is just fast enough for the job
- With a dedicated “retro” CPU chip
- With TV output (analog signal)
- Ability to produce sound
- With support for 2 controllers
- Scrolling background and moving sprites
- Ability to support Mario-style platform games (and of course other types of games as well)
- Games/Programs available through an SD Card
The reason I wanted SD card support instead of cartridge support, it’s mainly because it’s a lot more practical to have programs available in an SD card, as it makes it a lot easier to copy files from a PC to it. Having cartridges would mean to make even more hardware and to have a new hardware for each program.
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