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Tag: hardware

An update on minimig, and a (late) Happy New Year!

I know there wasn’t much updates on the minimig status, but with good (;)) reason: I’ve been pretty busy, so I had little time to work on minimig updates. I did spend quite some time on rewriting the CPU <-> minimig interface, which will hopefully reduce timing problems and enable me to finally add the ethernet Zorro interface. The CPU clock will also be reduced to 28MHz, hopefully that won’t affect the CPU speed much. This is quite…

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…

Building a Pentium-era Retro PC, Part 1

I was cleaning my ‘junkyard’ and came across some of the floppies and CDs from my first PC computer, and I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be nice to play some of those old games on a real PC of that era, instead of using something like DosBox? Plus, it would allow me to get away from Amiga for a little while, which has been getting most of my attention lately. Of course, being the…