Fuzebox The Box
Intro

Before starting to develop games, its a good idea to familiarize yourself with the Fuzebox interface

Front

The front of the fuzebox has 2 player ports that take SNES connectors. If you are feeling more retro, it is possible to install NES connectors, available from Parallax, instead

However, we'll assume you're using SNES controllers. Player 1 is to the left, Player to is on the right. To the right of the controller jacks is an indicator LED. This LED can be used for debugging, power good indication, etc. Below that is an input button. The button can be configured to do pretty much anything but in general its used to reset the box

Back

On the back are all of the inputs and outputs that run the box.

First on the left is a power input jack. The jack size is 5.5mm outer diameter and 2.1mm inner diameter, chosen because it is the most common connector size. The power input should be around 7VDC - 12VDC with 100mA - 1000mA input. The jack polarity should be center positive. If a center-negative adapter is plugged in, the internal protection diode will block it from damaging the internal circuitry. For help in identifying your adapter, check this article that includes information about wall supplies. The power draw of the Fuzebox is about 80-100mA.

Next to the left is the SD/MMC card slot. Right now, SD card support is still in the works, but at some point in the future it may be possible to load games into the box using an SD-bootloader so we added the hardware for future expansion

Next is the Audio out port. Sound is mono-only (there's just not enough processing speed for stereo), and comes out on an RCA jack. The output impedence is about 150ohms and there's no amplifier, so you can't plug in your super fancy 4 ohm headphones. Instead, its designed to go into a pre-amp or otherwise buffered/amplified audio source

Lastly, the two video ports, Composite and S-Video. Both run at the same time, so just plug into whichever you prefer. The S-Video port will give you better quality, but composite RCA is more common.

May 17, 2011 20:07