DIY F18a alternative

[leonk]

UPDATE: I flashed the V2 bitstream to the Tang Nano 9K and I noticed the following changes:

- on power up, the top 5 LED are always on
- I still get a black screen. When power cycling the TV, for a fraction of a second the expected test screen is shown and then goes black
- this suggests to me that everything is working as correctly.

I wish the firmware had better compatibility with TV's that are picky about standards compliance. I'm sure this will work great with a PC HDMI monitor that can show any signal you toss at it, but if you're testing using a Sony/Samsung/other standards enforcing TV, it might not work for you.

[RenderEng]

Try using one of these:

https://www.amazon.ca/axGear-Repeater-B ... B07DFWW8NC

It re-encodes the signal to a compliant hdmi

regarding the tang, did you set the jumper correctly ? you need jumper 3 and jumper 4 closed.

The v2 is for the V2 board, it has audio. Did you build the v1 ? you can check the vga if is working.

can you post pictures of your board ?

[ackshooerry]

Thanks to the help from this thread (and another on atariage that had lots of pictures) I was able to successfully build one of these (TN_VDP Version 2). I have basically no experience with this type of thing, but it seemed like fun so I just went for it. I’m excited because now I can use CloudCPM in 80 columns. I haven’t received my MPC3202 chip yet, but it works fine without it. (I assume that chip is used to convert sound to digital for the HDMI.) I am going to make another thread at some point to go through all of things I would have liked to know at the beginning as a complete amateur.

Anyway, here is a picture:

The screen shows “Adaptor Failure” because the host computer isn’t on. Someone on the atariage forum recommended that the cable between the two boards be kept as short as possible, so I just shoved one on top of the other. I think that’s how the v1 board was previously done. There’s probably a reason that’s a bad idea but, again, I have no idea what I am doing. I have enough parts to build a few more, although I have to buy more Tang Nanos first. I’ll probably do those ones with the cable.

While we’re on the subject, I’d like to say that contrary to what all of the YouTube ads would have you think, I found PCBWay very difficult to use. In particular, they wanted me to provide the board dimensions I wanted prior to uploading the Gerber files. I used JCLPCB instead, simply because it was the first site I found via Google where they had me upload the Gerber file first, and then they just took it from there.