MiSTer FPGA Forum

Hi all. Now that Discs of Tron is out on the mister, what's the chance someone with the knowledge could bring the triggers that the environmental cab uses to flash the lights and such out to the gpio pins so we can trigger our own lights?

I’d contribute real money to any effort to make it so that MiSTer could easily be used to replace the motherboard in a real EDOT. The coding is probably above my pay grade, but I have a real EDOT and I’d definitely help do the physical adapting. My board works and it’s not terrible to find someone who can repair those, but I’d still feel WAY better about having new hardware in there.


—Donnie

Because some Williams games would light up Player 1 and 2 Lights, specifically on the Robotron 2084-based systems, I would also like to at least understand what it would take to control these outputs and drive those lights realistically on a reproduction panel.

I'm thinking with the Linux side of the chip it might be possible to use an Ultimarc USB-LED controller, but that would still take knowing how a core can interact with the OS to drive the logic output.

depending on how many lights you need to control, you can easily use the 3 LED's (normally power, disk and user)

e.g.

assign LED_USER = UP;
assign LED_DISK = {1'd1,DOWN};
assign LED_POWER = {1'd1,LEFT};

lets me turn them on and off using the controls for the game

of course, if it needs to drive bulbs etc, rather than LED's you will need to boost the output

there's enough to drive the player 1 and 2 buttons at least!

if there are more things to light (up to 7) but only one is on at a time then you can add a 3 to 8 decoder chip and use binary on the lines.

Thanks! I am thinking Atari's "volcano" player select buttons have this function rather than the William's ones, though. It'll be a good place to check FPGA I/O for the logical output of those LEDs, which I suppose would be the foundation for EDOT outputs.

Mike, it's probably more involved than that. Assuming we're talking about the "running lights" in the EDOT cab then they are triggered by one (or more, I forget) "Light Sequencer Boards" in the cab which is a little PCB that has a row of transistors and from memory, a decoder chip. It's been well over 12 years since I've looked at one mind.

DoTRON Sequencer board has 3 bits sent to it from main board, enable, sequence select and speed, so needs 3 lines (and maybe a clock)
Flasher has 2 bits sent to it from main board, background on and flash on

so you would need 6 lines to drive it all, so abandon the second SD slot and use those lines

inout [3:0] SDIO_DAT,
inout SDIO_CMD,
output SDIO_CLK,

plus you still have the 3 LED lines as well.