help getting started in homebrew!!

[TheOldMan]

Sorry, Charlie. Sometimes I do tend to ramble on.

So, arkhan. Think we can scrape together abut $600 to do a run of the light cycle game ? After checking the eproms out, the board would be pretty simple to do. We'd need about $100 for an etching kit (unless you wanna go the extra $$ and get them made to order), and another $100-150 for a decent eeprom burner.
Figure another $200 for parts, which mouser / digitek / jameco have in stock and we could probably have it ready for xmas. What do you think?

I'm pretty seriously thinking of doing it anyway, for s-n-g. Fuzzy would probably loan me the $$ / help me find the stuff on-line, so I may go ahead and do a very small run to see if it would work. Looks like I found my winter project :-)

[Arkhan]

Sounds good to me but I think wasting the effort on a dopey light cycle game isn't worth it.  Maybe if I spiff up the visuals or some musics added.

[TheOldMan]

I think I'm actually gonna try this. A 6x6 board should make 4 blanks, and it's < $10. I can go single-sided (Yeah, I already did the layout) for the test boards. Another $20 will get parts for all 4 boards, so all I need now is an eeprom programmer :-)

And the light-cycle game is just for testing - it's small, already written, and should work from eeprom. IF we decide to do it on a larger scale (ie, more than 4 boards), We'd need to go with double-sided pro made boards (there's 50+ through holes for the us/jap version!) . At that point, yeah, we'd have to write a game for it to make it worth while.

[TheOldMan]

Update:
After playing with the pcb software and getting the circuit straightened out, I started working on home-brew etching of the board. Using the laser-toner method, and trying lots of different papers, I finally hit on something that gave (what I think are) decent results. Muriatic acid is now a 'hazardous material', so I went with a slightly slower route. The board etched, but it's not exactly usable - I may be asking too much from this method, since i have .010 inch traces, and almost all of them broke at one point or another. Interestingly, the board edge fingers look good.

I'm gonna give it another couple of tries; this really was my first (ever) attempt at doing something like this. But It looks like Charlie's right - if we wanna do this in quantity, we're gonna have to go to a board shop....
Anyone interested ? (Mooz- here's you chance for that proto-board....)

[Arkhan]

so thats why we havent heard from you in like a week