Classroom Glossary Public page

CON-101 Equipment and Setup Guide

What you need before Module 1 and where to get it. Read this once before you order anything.

Required hardware

  • Tang Primer 25K, the canonical Phase-1 board, carried over from CSA-101. If you finished CSA-101 you already own this. The CON-101 labs target it for the homebrew ROM path. Roughly thirty US dollars new.
  • DualShock 2 controllers, two of them. The academy kit ships with two so the cooperative-mode and head-to-head labs are doable from Week 7 forward. The SNES button set is a subset of the DS2 controller, so any SNES-compatible USB pad works as a fallback for the single-player labs.
  • microSD card, sixteen gigabytes or larger, plus a USB adapter for flashing.
  • USB-C cable for power and JTAG, and an HDMI cable for the video output path you trace in Module 8.

Optional hardware

  • DE10-Nano with a MiSTer add-on board, roughly two hundred and fifty US dollars. The MiSTer framework is the production-grade FPGA-retro-emulation archive; running the cores you study on the actual MiSTer board is the advanced-track path. The Tang Primer 25K runs the simplified academy-internal soft cores end-to-end without it.
  • A second HDMI-capable monitor for the Week 8 video-output debugging session.

Browser-only path

If you cannot get the hardware in time for cohort start, every Module 1 through Module 6 lab has a browser-only equivalent. The 8bitworkshop.com mirror in the academy workbench runs Hugg's reference designs in the browser. The SPK-101 jsnes emulator runs NES ROMs in the browser with a deep debugger (NES debugger R7) plus sprite, APU, and mapper inspectors. Module 7 (the homebrew ROM) can be developed entirely in the browser and only requires real hardware for the final flash; if you skip the flash, your capstone is browser-only and counts for a Tier-1 pass.

Required software

  • Quartus Prime Lite, for the MiSTer track only. Closed-source; Intel licenses it free for the academy use case. The academy SETUP video walks through the install.
  • iverilog + yosys + nextpnr + apicula, the open-source FPGA toolchain inherited from CSA-101.
  • cc65, the 6502 cross-compiler suite. Apt-installable on Debian-family distributions, Homebrew on Mac, binary releases for Windows.
  • GBDK for Game Boy work in Module 5; PVSneslib for SNES work in Module 6.
  • cc65 + Mesen for the pre-FPGA NES verification loop. Mesen ships a stronger debugger than the academy in-browser tools for the multi-day work in Modules 4 and 7.

Account setup

  • The academy classroom portal at portal.virtuscyberacademy.org. Same login as CSA-101.
  • An optional github.com/MiSTer-devel account if you want to file issues or follow per-core development.
  • An nesdev.org forum account if you want to ask questions of the homebrew NES community during Module 7.

First-week checklist

  1. Order the DualShock 2 pair and the microSD card.
  2. Install Quartus Prime Lite if you are going the MiSTer route; otherwise install cc65.
  3. Confirm you can boot the workbench in your browser, the bitplane decomposer renders, the 6502 REPL loads.
  4. Skim the public page for the course at vca-con-101.html; the format prescriptions there match this portal's expectations.
  5. Open CON-101 Course Outline and read the module map.