With a lot of help from true on the hardware front, help from Ilari on the lsnes front, and Masterjun on the glitched run front, I was finally able to get the SNES total control run to sync on my hardware. It turns out that true did all of his recent work using the GPIO serial header on the Pi while I was using the USB method and there is apparently a bug somewhere preventing that method from working right which is what plagued my testing on Monday. After switching over to the serial connection method, the picture got a bit more messy. It doesn't help that I never depopulated the old NESBot so the Pi is sitting right on top of the poor Arduino.
I at least have an excuse for why the SNES wires are a bit messy at this prototype stage, but even then, I had to get extremely creative to get the second controller DATA1 wire to stay in place by using a small screwdriver crammed in to keep the wire from slipping out.
The biggest problem I have is lack of proper jumper wires.
This is a good example of how not having enough equipment makes everything take so much longer to wire up. Between the Pi and the PCB, I have two old fan connectors hooked up to serial TX, RX, and ground, and the power is connected using two blue jumpers on a breadboard wire. The wire nuts prevent TX and RX from shorting to ground. Suboptimal is probably not a strong enough word. I'll be ordering a lot of parts later this week (after the US Thanksgiving holiday tomorrow) so I can make this a whole lot cleaner. Everything has to be portable enough to make it through the airport in carry-on luggage come January so I plan on putting together a proper wiring harness for the two SNES controllers with a pigtail at the SNES end similar to how USB powered DVD drives are designed.
Having said all of that, I am very happy to say that I was able to get the SNES glitched run to complete on my setup, which makes me exceedingly happy. As long as wires are in the right places it's very reproducible, which along with getting Gradius to sync is exactly what I was hoping for at the beginning of the project.
I'll be doing a dry run of what I plan on presenting at AGDQ 2014 on December 10th when I'll be giving a presentation at the
North Bay Linux User's Group. Linux was a key aspect of this process as I used FCEUX and lsnes Linux ports to convert the emulator-specific movie files to the correct format for the replay script which itself is running on Linux on a Raspberry Pi. With true's permission I plan on releasing the gerber files for the PCB as well as the PIC code and replay scripts as open source (likely with a simple attribution license) as soon as everything is cleaned up.
Again, thanks to everyone for the support!
A.C.
******
It's a bit tight with the scope probes connected, and I'm not entirely certain I haven't crossed a wire here.
At the moment I'm not seeing sane controller input but as soon as I can sort out my wiring problems (hopefully by taking apart a third controller and using its connectors) I'll be able to get SMW going myself. Again, huge thanks go to true for his work on scripts, and for Ilari for his work on lsnes and assistance understanding how to work with its lua scripts. Back with more soon,
A.C.
******
I at least have an excuse for why the SNES wires are a bit messy at this prototype stage, but even then, I had to get extremely creative to get the second controller DATA1 wire to stay in place by using a small screwdriver crammed in to keep the wire from slipping out.
The biggest problem I have is lack of proper jumper wires.
This is a good example of how not having enough equipment makes everything take so much longer to wire up. Between the Pi and the PCB, I have two old fan connectors hooked up to serial TX, RX, and ground, and the power is connected using two blue jumpers on a breadboard wire. The wire nuts prevent TX and RX from shorting to ground. Suboptimal is probably not a strong enough word. I'll be ordering a lot of parts later this week (after the US Thanksgiving holiday tomorrow) so I can make this a whole lot cleaner. Everything has to be portable enough to make it through the airport in carry-on luggage come January so I plan on putting together a proper wiring harness for the two SNES controllers with a pigtail at the SNES end similar to how USB powered DVD drives are designed.
Having said all of that, I am very happy to say that I was able to get the SNES glitched run to complete on my setup, which makes me exceedingly happy. As long as wires are in the right places it's very reproducible, which along with getting Gradius to sync is exactly what I was hoping for at the beginning of the project.
I'll be doing a dry run of what I plan on presenting at AGDQ 2014 on December 10th when I'll be giving a presentation at the North Bay Linux User's Group. Linux was a key aspect of this process as I used FCEUX and lsnes Linux ports to convert the emulator-specific movie files to the correct format for the replay script which itself is running on Linux on a Raspberry Pi. With true's permission I plan on releasing the gerber files for the PCB as well as the PIC code and replay scripts as open source (likely with a simple attribution license) as soon as everything is cleaned up.
Again, thanks to everyone for the support!
A.C.
******
I originally tried putting the Raspberry Pi up around his neck, but it didn't quite look right to me.
I'm using zipties at the moment which don't look too bad but I might try to find a better solution. I admit that I really like the impression that this gives that ROB is playing the game in question. My next step is to hook up the GPIO pins on the Pi to the LED on the top of ROB's head to make it flash every time a button is pressed. This could be a bit more of a challenge than normal as from here on out I don't have home-field advantage; we're leaving to visit family for Christmas and won't be back home until after AGDQ, so I'll have to do the rest of this "in the field".
Thanks again for everyone's support!
A.C.
******
