insideGadgets

So the Arduino software has been easy to use but I’m thinking about using V-USB in one of my projects. V-USB is an implementation of the USB protocol that can run on an Atmel AVR microcontroller but in order to integrate it into one of my projects it’s time to move away from the Arduino software.

I’ll show you how we can create our own version of the ATtiny45/85 Blink without the Arduino software. We will use setup/timer functions from the internal Arduino wiring.c file because it’s easier to use something that works.

First thing we’ll do is download WinAVR from http://winavr.sourceforge.net. After installation, the default directory is C:\WinAVR-20100110.

But before we start with WinAVR we need a starting template, so what I did was download AVR Studio 5 Beta and start a new blank project. The reason I’m using Programmers Notepad instead of AVR Studio is that it’s a very simple interface and from my testing actually compresses things better when compiling.

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So I’ve been able to read/write to a Gameboy cartridge so the next step is emulating one using an Arduino. I wasn’t be able to emulate the whole cartridge using my current methods but I did emulate the cartridge sending the Gameboy the Nintendo Logo. I’ll show you how we can analyse the data coming from the Gameboy and the various steps I went through to get it working.

Let’s jump to the Youtube video straight away to see the results.

The first thing required is a Gameboy that we can solder some wires to; the Gameboy that I took the cartridge header from was perfect for this and then just place those wires into a breadboard.

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GBCartRead the Arduino based Gameboy Cart Reader project is now completed. I’ve done everything I set out in terms of saving and restoring my Gameboy saves . GBCartRead has been updated to version 1.3 which has all the features of reading the ROM, reading RAM and writing to RAM.

The video above shows all features being used.

Now I just need to think about what my next project will be… the logical thing would be do the same with the SNES or I was thinking of working more on the gameboy by emulating a gameboy cartridge with the Arduino

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So what good is reading the RAM if we can’t write back to it? This is what we’ll cover in Part 3: Write to RAM.

Writing to the RAM is quite similar to reading the RAM except instead of reading the data pins you write to them. This part won’t be as large as our previous parts because we’re really just re-using our Reading the RAM code. Let’s jump right to the code.

...

  // Initialise MBC: 0x0A
 digitalWrite(3, HIGH);
 digitalWrite(5, HIGH);
 digitalWrite(wrPin, LOW); // WR on
 digitalWrite(wrPin, HIGH); // WR off

 // Write RAM (512 addresses)
 for (addr = 0xA000; addr <= 0xA1FF; addr++) {
   digitalWrite(latchPin, LOW);
   shiftOut(dataPin, clockPin, MSBFIRST, (addr >> 8));
   shiftOut(dataPin, clockPin, MSBFIRST, (addr & 0xFF));
   digitalWrite(latchPin, HIGH);
   delayMicroseconds(50);

All code up to the end of the shifting out the address is the same as in Part 2.

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I thought I’d take a little break and tear something apart, this time it’s the Super Gameboy SNES Adapter which allows you to play Gameboy games on the SNES.

Lets flip it over to see some chips.

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