The ANSI / VT-100 Terminal board for the RC2014 computer uses the open source firmware available on GitHub and therefore it can be freely modified by anyone. However, being written with the Parallax Propeller microcontroller’s own Spin language, it may be difficult, even for those who are familiar with microcontrollers programming, to understand how it works, therefore I will try to explain as simply as possible how to do some minor changes to make the firmware a bit more personal.
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I’m happy to present my first hardware project, a retro-style video games console with interchangeable cartridges based on the Parallax Propeller microcontroller. For those unfamiliar with this chip, it is a 32bit microcontroller with 32k RAM and 8 cores running in parallel at 80MHz, program code and data are readed from an external EEPROM and has 32 completely programmable input/output pins. The console design uses two of these chips to enhance the performances and allow more complex games than would be possible with just one. A chip is dedicated to the graphics and video output, the other chip is dedicated to the audio output and the main game logic.
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