For the past few weeks I've not been actively using GitHub anymore, at least for my open-source projects. The biggest reason for that is the visible degradation of the service, given the huge influx of AI-generated code and repositories and some disagreement with the AI-first focus that the platform is taking. From now on, my Git repositories are available at https://git.rafaelmartins.com/ that is…
I recently restarted playing with FPGAs, and found out about the Lattice iCE40 boards produced by Olimex . Despite already being kinda old designs (copyright marks on the boards mention 2016, almost 10 years ago!), they are very interesting. They feature an iCE40 FPGA (with options for 1k or 8k logic cells) paired with a generous amount of flash memory (2 MB, more than enough for storing the…
Hello friends! This is my fifth Retro Challenge RC2024/10 report. Today is the last day of the challenge, and unfortunately, I could not get something presentable as the result. I got some progress running reSID on the Daisy Pod I presented in the previous report, but it is not something I'd be really proud of. The retro challenge is over, but the project is not! I'll keep researching this topic…
Hello friends! This is my fourth Retro Challenge RC2024/10 report. Given the problems described in past reports, I took the decision regarding which platform to use during prototyping. Searching through my development boards, I found a Daisy Pod that is basically a breakout board for the Daisy Seed . It includes a single core STM32H7, which is more powerful than the STM32G4 series I plan to use,…
Hello friends! This is my third Retro Challenge RC2024/10 report. Following up on the problems I described in the second report , I’ve decided to downgrade from VICE's fork of reSID to the upstream reSID-0.16 , which seems to work much better for the microcontrollers, but requires more memory (both FLASH and RAM ) than the microcontroller I'm trying to compile to ( STM32G431KBT6 ) have. I'm…
Hello friends! This is my second Retro Challenge RC2024/10 report. Unfortunately, things are not going as expected. I ported the reSID codebase imported from the VICE emulator to build with CMake, but due to being a C++ library, it is not very compatible with the bare metal environment I usually develop my STM32 projects on. I am currently exploring the options I have for patching the library or…
Hello friends! After following the Retro Challenge for a few years, I decided to take part in this year’s edition ( RC2024/10 )! This post is an introduction to the project and also my first progress report. Please subscribe to this blog series’ Atom feed to receive the next reports. Project Introduction/Idea As a fan of synthesizers, my idea is to implement a “high-fidelity” SID (MOS6581 and…
Yep, I'm starting a blog again! I plan to use this space as a "replacement" for my social media presence, with the intent of "owning my content," especially due to the recent changes you may be aware of. Let's see how it goes…