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DMA controller chip

Posted: Sun Aug 14, 2005 3:52 am
by Steve F
I noticed on a Sony PowerPoint presentation an illustration from the official development debugger that showed the pipeline traffic while a game was running. Of course they recommend keeping all data paths filled for max benefit of the hardware.

I got to thinking if I wired some 74LS161 counter clock inputs to the DMA chip signal lines for the different data paths, and bussed the output of the counters back to my PC, I could measure pipeline bandwidths in realtime. I'm guessing $20 in parts and a couple days work to set it up.

Anybody know which chip is the DMA controller? I've looked on the internet for schematics and found nada. Schematics would help a bunch.

Posted: Sun Aug 14, 2005 4:09 am
by Saotome
Steve F wrote:Anybody know which chip is the DMA controller?
It's the big one, with "EE" written on it :P

I'm not really sure, but most of the slides i've seen about the EE show the DMAC inside the EE-block.