Close

The SGT1 ​state machine analysis

A project log for STEbus 6845/6803 video board

Reverse engineering a colour graphics video board

keithKeith 11/02/2022 at 00:250 Comments

This is the primary timing generator.

Rather than trying to capture screenshots of my logic analyser, it is easier and quicker to write a small C program to simulate it. So I did. See file J031-U27-analyser.c.

The waveforms look like this (state at the bottom, data above, white shaded is one MPU cycle):

from which we can deduce:

The DMS72S288 pinout is:

I had a long hard look at the binary sequencing, the see if it could be implemented in a 16V8 GAL.

CYC3 is easy, inverting every clock cycle.

The rest do not have an obvious pattern. The PROM allows any random sequence. A GAL would have to decode 32 OR terms to do the same. I expect the designers wanted to keep the flexibility to cope with potential changes. I think I'll leave this part of the circuit for now. 

Discussions