Prototype #1

This proto was wrought with peril; I blew up the MP3 decoder chip once by plugging the AC transformer into the headphone jack. Yeah, yuck it up now. :-) Both the AC wall wart plug and the headphone wire looked the same. I will not make that same mistake again (Especially since the thing will now have a *real* power supply for it). This is the very first iteration of the hardware, and was only meant to try out IDE harddrive interfacing mainly.

Overview

This proto was pretty darn complex, needing craploads of things in order to run. Along the top: The white box is my EPROM emulator which is being used to hold temporary test code for the 65816 main processor. Next to it, is my MP3 decoder board which has the usual MAS chipset. It's not hooked up in this pic 'cause it was damaged (it's since been fixed). Next to that is another board which is being used as the surrogate power supply until I get the new one. The large board in the middle is my main prototype board which is doing most of the work and is receiving the most development effort at the moment. Below that is the 4 line by 40 char LCD display for debugging, and to the left of the LCD is the pushbutton array; again for debugging. On the lower right is the harddrive.

Main Board

Here's a closeup of the main board. The 512K RAM chip is sitting to the left of the EPROM emulator's plug, and below the plug is the 65816 processor which is directing all the action. Below the processor is the port chip which is running the LCD and reading the pushbuttons. To the left of the proc and port is a bunch of glue logic; address decoding, etc. to the right of the proc is the IDE controller. It's the chip with the white label and is a PIC processor. Below it is the dual port RAM which acts as a go-between for the 65816 and the IDE controller. And finally, to the right of the dual port RAM is the FIFO for the MP3 decoder so that there will be no skips in the music.

LCD Display

Here the LCD can be seen showing where we are in the drive's directory structure at the bottom, and the currently selected file at the top. It is showing the .. directory, which is 0 bytes.

LCD Display

Another shot of the LCD, showing an actual MP3 with associated file size.