The TED chip (MOS 7360/8360) is the very heart of the x264 Series. It is labeled U1 in the schematics while the CPU is labeled U2, which really emphasizes how TED-centric these machines were. Unfortunately, just like the CPU, it has the nasty habit of self-destroying and replacement chips on the market aren't exactly cheap. Even more unfortunately it is unlike any other mass-produced chip ever so... are we screwed?

Enter FPGATED, an open project which is trying to come up with an 1:1 reimplementation on a FPGA (with even some nice extras such as RGB output!). Even though I definitely favor original chips over reimplementations (especially when they involve any amount of guesswork), in this particular case I think we don't have much choice as the originals are bound to disappear completely. Hopefully LittleSixteen will help them live longer but it will hardly be forever, so we need a Plan B. FPGATED seems to be the only project of this kind and luckily the author has started with the right foot:

Although there are some TED documents available on the internet, they are incomplete, not precise and do not fully describe the inner secrets of the chip. There is no point in creating a chip which is not cycle exact, doesn't emulate TED scan lines and events properly. An extensive research started on the hardware using own written test codes, logic analyzer, oscilloscope and source code analysis of Plus 4 emulators.

It is a slow project but it's constantly progressing, which makes me really confident that it will reach its goal sooner or later. It's already quite close to it actually, so good luck to the author!

Since FPGATED will be a drop-in replacement for the original TED, there isn't much to do on our side. Maybe we can come up with an header where the extra RGB signals can be connected and brought to the A/V connector using the same pinout as the Ultimate64 RGB Mode but I think I'll look into that for the next revision of the board.