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Ocelot Arcade System

Tabletop arcade system using oscilloscope display, 3D wireframe graphics, polyphonic sound, all powered by a Microchip PIC and TI DAC.

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The Ocelot Arcade System is a table-top home arcade system designed for use with an oscilloscope!

It uses a high-speed, high-precision, dual-channel DAC to generate 2D vector output. Two phono connectors on the side of the case allow connection to an oscilloscope configured in X‑Y mode. The 9-pin port on the front panel accepts common Amiga or Atari joysticks as well as correctly powering and reading Master System and Mega Drive controller pads (both 3- and 6-button pads).

The microcontroller within the Ocelot is powerful enough to calculate and draw sophisticated 2D and 3D wireframe graphics in real-time, as well as produce four-channel polyphonic sound amplified and output by a built-in amplifier and speaker section within the case.

Ocelot games are firmware images for the dsPIC33, written in C. There's two games for the Ocelot: Star Lynx, a 3D third-person flight-into-the-screen space shooter with talking animals and a huge floating-head final boss; and Mattsteroids, a classic blow-up-the-rocks arcade game!

Both are written by me and written atop an abstraction layer that combines the physical interfaces with some useful services like graphics and sound to produce a complete arcade system.

As a side note, the architecture only allows running code from internal flash - this is why it's more of a tabletop arcade similar to Grandstand Astro Wars than a home console like a Mega Drive. It'd be possible to give the Ocelot a bootstrapper that reads in cartridges (ROMs with an edge connector) and spontaneously flashes itself with the game it finds (or does a little checksum dance to see if it already has the current game 'installed' and skips that if not). The PIC is only rated for a finite amount of flashes, but if you needed a consoleish Ocelot, that's how it'd work.

  • 1 × Microchip dsPIC33FJ128GP802 40 MIPS, lots of GPIOs, 3.3v supply hooray. I don't use the internal DAC because it's designed for audio only sadly. 2013 prototypes used an Arduino Due which was clean and stable, but I couldn't get that quality from the dsPIC.
  • 1 × Texas Instruments TLV5618A Dual channel high-precision DAC. Runs off the same supply voltage, hooray! But mostly importantly has a SPI command that updates both the A and B channels simultaneously! Why the heck would you NOT want to be able to control that over the same SPI bus as sending values?

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etheridgeerik wrote 11/04/2018 at 12:10 point

Can you instruct me on how to build this? Schematics, components list, this sort of thing?

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Matt Carr wrote 12/19/2017 at 07:10 point

Please ask me any questions you'd like about the Ocelot! ^_^

I'm not sure what kinds of things folks would like to read about, or see in a video.

- Matt C.

  Are you sure? yes | no

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