And by cold I mean both weather and the fact that I got sick. That has seriously slowed down GDEMU assembly so I’m running a bit behind schedule now.
There’s another problem as well – my primary supplier has run out of FPGAs I use and the next delivery will happen in December (if there are no more delays). It’s important because they got them considerably cheaper than other sources (Farnell, Mouser, etc) so I can’t just order those somewhere else without raising GDEMU price. Well, truth be told I did order some anyway, to fill the gap a bit, I’m going to cover the price difference myself – but that’s not a viable long term solution.
On the bright side I did manage to finish and test the ARM7 replacement I wrote about earlier, this is how it compares:

The new chips is what, 3x faster than the old one? Plus I got rid of the serial Flash on the other side, I never used that anyway and it only permanently tied one I/O for chip select signal. One more step towards PCE prototype.
Somewhat interesting trivia: Atmel named most of their ARM MCU family “SAMx” where x is a digit, 7 for ARM7, 3 for Cortex-M3 and 4 for Cortex-M4. Now that ARM has came up with a new Cortex-M core, and decided to call it M7 rather than M5, I wonder what Atmel will do 🙂
Oh, and this might also interest some of you, RheaV2:

Does it work? Well, do bears shit in the woods?
After a few tweaks to the PCB layout I’m going to try and sell some 20-30 units, if at all possible, to interested parties. For now I’d like to run some more tests to make sure this device works as intended, this will take time though. A few weeks probably. However I might be persuaded to sell something before I finish testing, provided that you fully understand you’re buying a cat in a bag. Or a pig in a poke for you English speakers.
So, to sum this up, this is just 20-pin drive emulator for now. It hasn’t been tested much with all the changes from V1 (most importantly, a different MCU). I still have to make sure you can pair it up with later models using a single piece of flat cable, as SEGA seems to have reversed the connector orientation on the mainboard for some reason. It would be best to use a connector with contacts on 2 sides for that very reason but good luck finding that on sale, at reasonable price. I’d prefer to use ZIF connectors but these are always top or bottom side contacts. It will most likely require you to solder 1-2 wires for 5V power supply. And the very first units are probably going to be more expensive due to small batch. But you might just get a fancy Xmas gift 😛
Anyway, if you’re feeling lucky, drop me a mail. Expect ~130 Euro quote. Serious offers only for now, my head is killing me and I’m really not in the mood for “maybes”.