The CPU boards carries the main CPU 65c02, 64k RAM organized in two 32k * 8 SRAM chips (62256). We decided to use SRAM just because it’s much simpler to use than DRAM as we do not need a DRAM conroller. Also, small SRAM chips are cheap and easy to obtain. The ROM is a 28c256 EEPROM, which is banked in at $e000 in 8k steps. Clock generation and reset circuit reside on the CPU board, too.
In it’s current incarnation, the Steckschwein consists of 3 main units:
CPU/Memory IO (VIA 65c22), now also including UART SPI-Devices UART 16550 Joysticks and user port Video / audio board with V9958 VDP and YM3812 (OPL2) sound chip The 62c22 VIA is mainly utilized as SPI master to implement SPI as the main peripheral bus, connecting SD-card, RTC and the ATmega8 (used as PS/2 controller) to the system. The block diagram shows how things are working together.
One of the fundamental design decisions when creating the Steckschwein was to use SPI as the main peripheral bus. This way, various different devices can be utilized using a single interface protocol. The main killer feature for using SPI was to be able to use an SD card as mass storage. This gives us mass storage with almost no extra hardware effort, only level conversion is needed between the system (5V) and the card (3.
Since after using all of VIA Port B for SPI, all we have left is Port A to hook up anything else. One of our design goals is to be able to hook up two Atari/Commodore style joysticks. With only one 8bit IO port left, this is a bit tricky. Our first approach was to wire up the joysticks in a matrix like arrangement, but this suffered from the infamous matrix ghosting problem.
SD-Card as really cheap and lazy mass storage The SD card is the “killer application”, that sold the idea to us to use SPI as the main peripheral bus. The only additional hardware effort was to level shift the signals from and to the sd-card, as it runs on 3.3V while the Steckschwein uses 5V. To accomplish this, the SPI clock, SPI slave select and MOSI are converted using a 74LS07, with it’s open collector outputs pulled up to 3.