The Prodigy #4 - add some RAM and a VIA device

The latest findings in the effort to preserve and emulate the Prodigy reveals that we need to move ROM to address 0x6000 and add some RAM. The easiest way to allow something on both 0x6000 for execution and 0xe000 in order to provide a reset vector from 0xFFFC is simply to ignore address lane A15 such that the ROM is selected in both places. No circuits I have seen on the PCB so far tells me that we have a more advanced decoding so lets ignore A15!

In MAME this is done using the AM_MIRROR macro with an argument that tells MAME what lanes to ignore for this particular device, in our case the argument is 0x8000 as we want to ignore A15. Adding some RAM at 0x0000 is simple, the M58725P is a 2KB so the range is between 0x0000 and 0x07ff:

So lets fire up the MAME debugger again and see where we end up:

Hiya, the PC after reset point at the address 0x60B7, just like we wanted! :) All good so far. Lets what we miss in our address map by opening the console (Ctl-L) and run the code (F5).

Interesting, there are just a few accesses to the VIA at startup and then the CPU lies in a tight loop waiting for address 0x30 to change while stepping up address 0x7A. This suggests that the VIA will change address 0x30 using interrupts, unless the VIA is very strangely mapped to these addresses directly! Lets hook it up and see what happens.

Add the definitions of the VIA driver

Initiate the instantiated VIA device called m_via

Tell MAME that this is a required device, not a lot option or otherwise optional in any way 

Map the device to the address space we have identified

Add the device to the machine, lets use the CPU 2MHz crystal for now

Don't worry I have submitted this skeleton driver to Github so you don't need to stitch it together yourself and figure where they end up in the driver. These steps are the minimum when adding a new device. In addition we need to configure drivers for the interrupt and what will happen when the ports are accessed, but that is for later, c ya! Next-->