PPU pinout

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Revision as of 18:09, 5 August 2016 by Rainwarrior (talk | contribs) (renaming CPU address A2-A0 to R2-R0 to avoid confusion between this and the PPU address which is also mostly using A to label pins?)
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Pin out

         .--\/--.					 
  R/W -> |01  40| -- +5
   D0 <> |02  39| -> ALE
   D1 <> |03  38| <> AD0
   D2 <> |04  37| <> AD1
   D3 <> |05  36| <> AD2
   D4 <> |06  35| <> AD3
   D5 <> |07  34| <> AD4
   D6 <> |08  33| <> AD5
   D7 <> |09  32| <> AD6
   R2 -> |10  31| <> AD7
   R1 -> |11  30| -> A8
   R0 -> |12  29| -> A9
  /CS -> |13  28| -> A10
 EXT0 <> |14  27| -> A11
 EXT1 <> |15  26| -> A12
 EXT2 <> |16  25| -> A13
 EXT3 <> |17  24| -> /RD
  CLK -> |18  23| -> /WR
 /INT <- |19  22| <- /RST
  GND -- |20  21| -> VOUT
         `------'

Signal description

  • R/W, Dx, R0, R1, R2 are signals from the CPU. R2-R0 are tied to the corresponding CPU address pins (A2-A0 on the CPU) and select the PPU register (0-7).
  • /CS is generated by the 74139 (address decoder) on the mainboard to map the PPU regs in the CPU memory range from $2000 to $3FFF.
  • EXTx allows the combination of two PPUs - setting the "slave" bit in the PPUCTRL ($2000) register causes the PPU to output palette indices to these pins, and clearing said bit causes it to instead read indices from these pins (and use them to select the background color). For the Vs. System and Playchoice PPUs, EXT0…2 are replaced with R, G, and B respectively. EXT3 is tied to ground; its functionality is unknown.
  • CLK is the 21.47727 MHz (NTSC) or 26.6017 MHz (PAL) clock input. It is doubled for the color generator (and then divided by 12 to get the colorburst frequency) and also divided by 4 (NTSC) or 5 (PAL) for the pixel and memory clocks.
  • /INT is connected to the CPU's /NMI pin.
  • ALE (Address Latch Enable) goes high at the beginning of a PPU VRAM access and is used to latch the lower 8 bits of the PPU's address bus; see the PPU address bus section of PPU rendering. It stays high for one PPU cycle.
  • ADx (Address + Data) is the PPU's data bus, multiplexed with the lower 8 bits of the PPU's address bus.
  • A8..A13 are the top 6 bits of the PPU's address bus.
  • /RD and /WR specify that the PPU is reading from or writing to VRAM. As an exception, writing to the internal palette range (3F00-3FFF) will not assert /WR.
  • /RST resets certain parts of the chip to their initial power-on state: the clock divider, video phase generator, scanline/pixel counters, and the even/odd frame toggle. It also keeps several registers zeroed out for a full frame: PPUCTRL, PPUMASK ($2001), PPUSCROLL ($2005; the VRAM address latch "T", fine X scroll, and the H/V toggle), and the VRAM read buffer. It is used in the NES to clear the screen when the console is reset either by the button or the CIC, and in a dual-PPU system it can be used to genlock the two PPUs together.
  • VOUT is the shifted analog video output. For the Vs. System and Playchoice PPUs, this is only the composite sync signal.

See also