CON-101 takes the FPGA methodology you built in CSA-101 and points it at the open-source retro-computing community's soft cores. You inherit NES, Game Boy, and SNES cores written by other people, study what choices their authors made, modify them, and finish by porting or writing a homebrew ROM to a console you synthesised yourself.
Start here: CON-101 Course Outline →
Overview
Weekly modules
- Week 1: DE10-Nano + Quartus + MiSTer Setup
- Week 2: The 6502 ISA Anchor
- Week 3: NES PPU and APU Internals
- Week 4: Cartridge Mappers and Bank Switching
- Week 5: Game Boy LR35902 Architecture
- Week 6: SNES 65C816 and the 16-bit Successor
- Week 7: Homebrew ROM Development
- Week 8: Audio, Video, and HDMI on MiSTer
- Week 9: Cousin Mapping, Retro to Modern
- Week 10: Capstone Delivery
Labs
- Lab Pack 1: DE10-Nano Boot + Stock NES Core (Week 1)
- Lab Pack 2: 6502 Assembly on the NES Core (Week 2)
- Lab Pack 3: NES Palette Modification (Week 3)
- Lab Pack 4: MMC1-Variant Mapper (Week 4)
- Lab Pack 5: Game Boy Core Frame Trace (Week 5)
- Lab Pack 6: SNES vs NES Compare and Contrast (Week 6)
- Lab Pack 7: Original Homebrew ROM (Week 7)
- Lab Pack 8: HDMI Output Path Trace (Week 8)
- Lab Pack 9: NES to SB6141 Cousin Mapping (Week 9)
- Lab Pack 10: Capstone Delivery (Week 10)
Classroom tools
CON-101 leans on the SPK-101 emulator suite for everything you can do in the browser before flashing real silicon. Open these from the workbench or from the SPK-101 portal directly.
- Workbench index for the full classroom tool catalog.
- Bitplane decomposer for NES sprite + tile bytes. Walk any tile from a loaded ROM byte by byte.
- HDL drag-drop simulator for the gate-level layer underneath the cores you are reading.
- 6502 REPL workbench for Module 2 and Module 7 6502 assembly without a real cart.
- 6502 die zoom for the CSA-101 NAND budget refresher.
- SPK-101 classroom for the full jsnes + NES debugger + sprite/APU/mapper inspector chain you will be reading from.