Amiga CD32 - games development | Articoli

Hello Friends,

here starts a little course about Amiga CD32 games development...

I hope that little tricks coming from past will help for the future of great Amiga machines.

The System - Amiga CD32

Reporting Commodore's engineers group words:

....an exciting product has emerged from Commodore engineering. It combines the graphics excellence of the Amiga computers family with the megastorage and audio purity of the CD-ROM, making it an instant force for all to reckon with. There is a new standard in the videogame world and its name is the Amiga CD32 game system...

This system is a console first of all, then a real computer. Let 's have a look to its features:

On board we also find:

two joy ports
S-video jack
composite video jack
RF output jack
stereo audio jacks
keyboard connector
full expansion bus
volume control switch
headphone jack
external brick power supply
internal mpeg full motion video (FMV) expansion capability
optional computer module
multiple session disc capability

motherboard:

it is roughly 6" by 12" and is a 4 layer board...

On the main PCB is a 14Mhz Motorola 68ec020, the AA chipset, an ASIC called AKIKO, a DAC for playing standard CD audio and a small amount of EEPROM.

Akiko...some words about this revolutionary chip...: it is a 160-pin PQFP surface mounted device containing most of the remainder of the logic necessary in the Amiga CD32; it includes the CD-ROM control logic and the system timers.

EEPROM has a 8K bits size to store settings, high scores, bookmarks etc.

A pal or ntsc modulator is included on board.

The compact disc DAC is a standard 18 bit, 8x oversampling DAC. Along with the superb audio quality of the DAC, the Amiga CD32 expansion connector has digital audio input capability in order to mix an external spurce such as MPEG audio with the CD audio and Amiga audio.

The AA chipset:

Paula, Alice and Lisa summarize this chipset;

Paula controls the I/O ports, potentiometer inputs, the audio hardware and interrupt control

Alice is the DMA controller. It generates DMA addresses, controls Chip RAM access, video timing and includes the blitter and copper (co-processor)

Lisa is the video data chip. It provides the 16-million color palette, playfield scrolling, sprite control, joystick and genlock support.

This chipset is ideal for building and playing videogames: