COMPUTER SYSTEMS ARCHITECTURE

Memo

To: CSA class

From: Peripherals Group

Date: September 12, 2001

Re: Status Report of Meeting 2

Our group met at 1pm in the Computer Science lab to discuss the documents we found about the NES controller that we decided to use for Pong. Altogether our group found over ten links that were written about several different projects that others had implemented. Among our findings were the schematics of the NES controller (which ports had what functionalities) and also some source code for the Super NES controller in Assembly language. We met later at 3:30pm due to other meeting conflicts. During the time in between, David Wicke and Jenn researched more sites on the NES controller and printed out copies of other schematic designs that would be useful.

When we later met up again, our group discussed how we would test the controller to know what the signals were for the outputs. The plan is to allow the controller 8 bits, one for each of the buttons (start, select, up, down, right, left, the A button,and the B button). The port will read in the lower 8 bits and then latch. This will go on as long as there are bits to read in to the port. The only problem with this is that there may be a timing issue, however, we plan to correct this by hardwiring each of the connections individually.

David Perenic offered to build a circuit that would aid in testing the controller and powering up the board. David Wicke and Jenn agreed to begin research for information on how to implement connections for the VGA. We decided to meet again on Sunday, September 16, 2001 at 6pm in the Computer Science lab to test the controller.