Musings on FPGA and Retro Computing
This week I was asked to help prepare artwork for a commercial print job. The job involves a die-cut template to be used for packaging across a range of products, for which there are some 40 different variants. The customer … Continue reading →
Some months ago I had the idea of improving the prefetch on the TG68K soft CPU in order to reduce the amount of time it spent waiting for the cache / SDRAM. In the Minimig core on MiST / SiDi128 … Continue reading →
Those of us still developing cores for devices containing Cyclone III chips are stuck with an ancient version of Quartus II, namely version 13.1. Those who still need to target the venerable Cyclone II or Max7000 series can’t even bask … Continue reading →
I recently bought a Tang Nano 20K FPGA board, due to my interest being piqued by the Nanomig project. This is the work of Till Harbaum (creator of the MiST project more than a decade ago), and combines this tiny … Continue reading →
This is my first blog post in more than eighteen months, and while I’ve not been nearly as active tech-wise as previously, I am still porting cores to the Turbo Chameleon 64 (see https://www.patreon.com/coresforchameleon), and more recently I was kindly … Continue reading →
I recently came across some very interesting one-line programs, which generate some primitive music from simple logic expressions – a genre which has come to be known as “bytebeat”. Being in need of a pointless-but-fun project requiring little to no … Continue reading →
I’ve been exploring Yosys / NextPnR / Project Trellis on some Lattice ECP5-based boards recently, and I’ve been very impressed and enthused by what I’ve seen. I do have to admit, though, that it’s not “there” yet, especially when it … Continue reading →
2022-05-14 Continuing my experiments with the IceSugar-Pro board, building cores using Yosys and friends, I now have EightThirtyTwoDemos running, using PMODs to provide VGA out, I2S audio out, PS/2 keyboard and mouse, and SD card. (The latter isn’t strictly necessary … Continue reading →
Coping without SignalTap – Part 3 – 2022-04-28 I’ve found the bug which was preventing interrupts from working with the EightThirtyTwo CPU, at least in the EightThirtyTwoDemos projects… … and of course, it was something simple and blindingly obvious. Here’s … Continue reading →
Coping without Signaltap – Part 2 – 2022-04-26 By the end of part 1 I was able to communicate over JTAG with a design running on the IceSugarPro, remotely control the LEDs on the board and read the contents of … Continue reading →