Regardless of what I mention in the previous post, it turns out my problems had nothing to do with the LCD screen I bought.  For reasons that are not entirely clear, the version of the SX-Key IDE which I have seems to not like the SX-Key that came in my kit.  It will program the SX just fine, but it doesn’t seem to generate a proper clock signal for it on the first try.  After trying the NTSC demo programs on a CRT TV, I became frustrated and decided to poke around with the manual clock control feature of the SX-Key IDE.  Well, merely engaging this feature seemed to cause the SX-Key to reset the SX and issue the correct clock signal.  I was then able to confirm correctness on my little LCD TV at home.

It’s still not a good idea to use an LCD screen apparently.  Some of them are just fussy, while older CRT screens will forgive you a bit more.

Anyway, the demos are pretty cool.  One is a monochrome test pattern, one is a color test pattern, and one is a scrolling star field that immediately made me go “Oooh!  I am building a game console!”  This is also the first time I’ve confirmed the correctness of a resistor ladder on a breadboard, which makes me feel good for my breadboarding skills.

This lesson definitely makes it worth it.  It also is a great reminder of using the XGameStation forums as part of the kit.  While I would really like to see Nurve add more material to the kit regarding ways to debug a circuit which is going wrong, they do a good job of tracking the forums and being patient with rookie questions and mistakes.

I’d encourage anyone having trouble with this lesson to follow the discussion thread I’d started over there.  It might give you some interesting ideas on how to debug an R2R ladder or how to poke about with the somewhat temperamental SX-Key.

Lesson 8 involves putting the entire XGameStation Pico on a breadboard.  I’m going to skip this and proceed to soldering it to the PCB.  I don’t feel I need the extra breadboard practice, and while it is a risk to solder down a circuit that hasn’t been tried out on a breadboard, I’m willing to take that risk.