Skip to content

Tag: FPGA

qSoC – The OR1200 CPU

The OR1200 is a RISC-type, Harvard architecture (separate instruction and data buses) synthesizable CPU core, written by the OpenCores community. It can be configured with a number of optional components, such as cache, MMU, FPU, timer, programmable interrupt controller, debug unit, etc. For sake of simplicity, I decided to disable most of the optional components, except the hardware multiplier and divider, all other features will be added if/when needed. The OR1200 has standard GNU tools available,…

qSoC, or how to build an FPGA SoC from scratch

Introduction I’d like to talk about how to build a fast, lean, clean SoC machine. What is an SoC? An SoC, or a System On a Chip, is, simply put, a microprocessor with some common peripherals attached, like ROM, RAM, SDRAM controller, UART, SPI, GPIO, and other I/O ports or protocols, all tied up into a system. An SoC is not unlike a microcontroller, which also has a microprocessor bundled with some sort of memory…

minimig AGA v1.2 for the MiST board released

There is a new release of minimig-AGA for the MiST board available, grab it on the minimig-mist page! While the CPU is still not as stable as I’d like, the latest bitfield fixes by Till Harbaum fixed a lot of games and demos that didn’t work properly before. The OSD Turbo option is not needed or recommended for games or demos anymore, but could still be used for a little speed up in Workbench or programs. F11…

Upgrading minimig with AGA capabilities, Part 2

So, to continue from Part 1, the rest of additions in Denise. Denise bitplane updates First, of  course, the bitplane count needs to be upgraded from ECS’ 6 bitplanes to AGA’s 8 bitplanes, together with everything dependent on it, like collision detection for 8 bitplanes, two additional bitplane output buffer registers, playfield support, etc. Quite a lot of code changes in this step, but not hard to do – basically, I just followed the existing code and…