PCEngineFans.com - The PC Engine and TurboGrafx-16 Community Forum
Tech and Homebrew => Turbo/PCE Game/Tool Development => Topic started by: BigusSchmuck on June 14, 2012, 05:15:01 PM
Title: What would it take...
Post by: BigusSchmuck on June 14, 2012, 05:15:01 PM
To start manufacturing turbo/pcengine motherboards? It can't be all that hard considering how cheap technology has gotten as of late...
Title: Re: What would it take...
Post by: BlueBMW on June 14, 2012, 05:25:34 PM
The trouble I see is the handful of proprietary chips that cannot be sourced. Maybe they could be reverse engineered and manufactured, but I suspect that would be cost prohibitive.
Title: Re: What would it take...
Post by: SignOfZeta on June 14, 2012, 08:10:33 PM
It takes serious money to manufacture chips, no matter how old they are. If you FPGAed it you could do it for very little money, but it would take someone with considerable skill and access to Hudson-level documentation to orchestrate such a thing.
Not really worth it since a real PCE can be had for $50 anyway...
Now, a serial ATA adaptor...that would be something worth doing. :)
Title: Re: What would it take...
Post by: soop on June 14, 2012, 10:24:18 PM
I don't know how possible it is, but ideally you want the equivilent to a NES on a chip. cheap as ... er, chips :D
Here, look at this old post: http://www.pcenginefx.com/forums/index.php?topic=4034.10
And it looks like someone has actually made one; I'd love to see this being produced, as (aside from the HuCard slot) it would be so easy to make a low power, ultra-portable PC-Engine. I'd f*cking love that, it would probably cost about £50 to make, with half that being the LCD screen.
Title: Re: What would it take...
Post by: spenoza on June 15, 2012, 03:49:04 AM
I contacted the creator of that FPGA project via YouTube and he's using a non-free 6502 core, so he can't share or use the project commercially. I know there are a couple open/free 6502 cores out there, though, so if he was interested in sharing this project he could probably just substitute much of the data.
Title: Re: What would it take...
Post by: soop on June 15, 2012, 04:29:37 AM
I contacted the creator of that FPGA project via YouTube and he's using a non-free 6502 core, so he can't share or use the project commercially. I know there are a couple open/free 6502 cores out there, though, so if he was interested in sharing this project he could probably just substitute much of the data.