I’ve been working on a project recently that would use a custom Sega game cartridge to turn the Sega Genesis into an audio-reactive visual generator. What that means is you would plug the VIDEON game cartridge into the Genesis and plug your audio source into the game cartridge. The game would take the data from the audio source and translate it into visuals that would move with the music.
Here is a basic mock up of an Ultimate design I would like to acheive with an SD card function and an Audio Out headphone jack.
While the Ultimate version is a goal, right now I am just attempting to get the basic functions to work. I’ve designed a prototyping board with only Audio In and no SD Card funtion.
This board will allow me to use jumper cables to work out the embedded systems that are needed to make this project work.
I’m ordering PCBS for another project, going to add these to that order. Once I get them I can start testing. I will keep you all updated as I make progress. It’s a long journey to this project’s end, and these are just the first steps.
The EPROM was too low, it goes inside the Genesis… This is ok for the final design, but while I am prototyping I would like to add an EPROM socket so I can remove and reprogram the EPROM while working on the code. So this design will not work for now. I redesigned the PCB and came up with this:
Still waiting on my EPROM sockets to come in and some new MSGEQ7s and STM32s, but basically this is what it will kinda of look like when populated with all the pieces:
I made a mistake in thinking the STM32 would send data to the EPROM. I now believe the STM32 should be sending data directly to the Genesis CPU using game cartridge pins.
Now that I have this figured out, the next step is writing the code for the STM32. Problem is the EPROM uses these Address and Data Bus lines to send information to the Genesis. So I’ll probably be quiet on this thread for a bit while I teach myself multiplexing.
