PICs for other purposes

[Davo]

The issue of multicarts for vintage video games has been rolling around in my mind for quite some time.  All the really good ones are no longer available, so I thought if I could learn the bare metal of PICs, particularly the PIC16F88, I could make my own.  Can I get some suggestions for books to read on microcontrollers?

There are dumb multicarts and smart ones.  Dumb ones aren't much more than a large ROM and some dip switches.  In a smart multicart, a microcontroller translates addresses.  Any arbitrary swath of memory can be presented as a ROM of whatever size.  So, when the pic first powers up, it shows the menu program.    The pic is told which rom to load up through an otherwise unused IO port and then the game starts.

My fantasy multicart would be one that accepts a DOS-formatted SD card, so I guess I'd need a beefy PIC to handle that.  Any comments?

[buhler]

1. it depends on the machine you are planning on working with

2. for binary codes (i.e. ROMs) you need EPROMs, generally 2764 or 27128 chips

3. you need an EPROM programmer and an EPROM eraser

4. you need a PCB with the right pin alignment of the cart port on your machine. 

i.e. unless you plan on having one ROM per cart, you're better off getting a Smart or Multi cart for your machine to run multiple ROMs.  the problem though, is finding a program that will allow you to transfer the ROMs from a PC to your machine... for example, APE(software) and a SIO2PC cable (which there is also a SIO2SD now!) for the ATARI computers or 64HDD(software) and an XE1541 cable for the C64.