Hello and welcome to our first team post!
This past week, we worked on nailing down our design requirements and scaling back our design to something which can be met within our time limit. The main changes in this area are to the Pixel Processing Unit (PPU) and Audio Processing Unit (APU).
For the APU, we now intend to implement something very similar to that of the Game Boy Advance (GBA), which merely offers buffered 8-bit samples to two DACs. We currently intend to provide mono output for this sound. This is simpler than designing several wave generators and an interface to manage them, while also giving our users more freedom in the sounds they can create using our console.
For the PPU, we decided that instead of implementing a subset of what the GBA offers we will instead design something new from the ground up. This gives us the freedom to meet our requirements in a way which is efficient for our time, and ensures that we can adjust the design to meet the requirements of the rest of our system. For example, we may require increased sprite size capabilities, compared to the GBA, as our display is larger.
Our requirements document (updated 2/20/21) can be found here:
http://course.ece.cmu.edu/~ece500/projects/s21-teamc1/wp-content/uploads/sites/133/2021/02/FP-GAme-Requirements-2-20-21.pdf