DeMiSTifying the Atari ST core

2021-10-02

The DeMiSTify framework has now proved useful in porting a number of retro console and computer cores from the MiST board to the Turbo Chameleon 64, and others have found it useful in porting cores to the DECA board, which I mentioned in my previous post.

However, the jewel in the MiST crown has always been the Atari ST cores: it has two – the original MiST core which was developed side-by-side with the board sharing its name – and also the MiSTery core, an evolution of the project which features a cycle-exact implementation of the CPU and also most of the chipset.

Continue reading

Snake Charming with USB Audio…

2021-09-23

A few months ago I bought a couple of the ridiculously cheap DECA boards from Arrow – they’re sadly sold out now – but $37 bought you a MAX10 FPGA with 50,000 LEs, some DDR3 RAM, i2s audio, an HDMI port, USB and network ports, and a couple of GPIO headers. (It also bought you all the blue LEDs – I highly recommend not looking directly at the board when you power it up for the first time!)

I’m not the only one who’s been interested by this board – a bunch of MiST and MiSTer cores have already been ported to a DECA-based reference platform which involves a MiSTer-style SDRAM module, PS/2 keyboard, DB9 joystick and VGA video on the GPIO headers.

There is now an open-source DDR3 memory controller which has DECA as a main supported target.

And there is a project which caught my attention recently, which turns the DECA board into an external USB2 soundcard.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Naturally I wanted to try this out, so I cloned the repo on my own machine. Hmmm… there seems to be lots of Python involved. I’m not familiar with Python, but by now it’s a well-established, mature language with reliable, well-thought-out packaging and dependency management, right?

Continue reading

A Crash Course in SignalTap

2021-08-07

A few weeks ago I was helping someone with an FPGA problem, and realised that I take for granted the phenomenally useful tool that is SignalTap. Since the person I was trying to help wasn’t familiar with it, I put together a quick Crash Course video. Initially unlisted, it’s apparently been useful for at least one other person, so I decided to make it public in the hope that others might find it useful too

Maybe I’ll do some more Crash Courses in future…

Gotta go fast…

Writing a new SDRAM controller – part 3 – 2021-07-25

In the previous instalments I talked about improving throughput by interleaving read and write transactions to different banks, as well as access patterns I need to avoid and some subtle timing issues which need to be considered.

The challenges remaining to be solved are ensuring that the controller responds in good time to incoming requests on multiple ports, and making the controller run fast enough that it meets timing at the desired speed. For the PC Engine core the desired clock speed is 128MHz

Continue reading

Writing a new SDRAM controller

Part 1 – 2021-07-04

In my last post I talked about the need to adjust the SDRAM controller used by the Megadrive core to make it work on the TC64V2, and having released that port it was time to turn my attention to the PC Engine core.

This one has actually been on the back burner for months. I started to port it at the beginning of the year, found that it didn’t work on TC64V2 and didn’t yet understand why not. With plenty of other projects to keep me busy I neglected this one for a while, but revisited it recently, armed with fresh knowledge about why it wasn’t working.

Read More

Is it a bug? I still don’t know!

2021-06-23

To recap, I had chosen the MiST Megadrive/Genesis core as my next project in porting to Turbo Chameleon 64 – in theory a simple task since the core leaves enough logic and block RAM free to simply bolt on the DeMiSTify component and go.

Except…

Well, nothing’s ever simple, is it? The port worked fine on the Turbo Chameleon 64 V1, worked fine on DE10-lite, and failed on Chameleon 64 V2.

Continue reading

Solving the puzzle…

Exploring audio DACs in simulation – Part 3 – 2021-04-03

Having set up a simplistic testbench in Verilator, I want to be able to use it to evaluate several different DACs. The ones I will be testing are:

  • The simple 1st-order Sigma Delta I included in my last post.
  • A 2nd order DAC found on Github: https://github.com/hamsternz/second_order_sigma_delta_DAC/blob/master/second_order_dac.v – however, I’ve adapted this to halve the input volume by discarding the lowest bit, since second- (and higher) order 1-bit sigma delta DACs are unstable at the extremities of their input range – they require some headroom. Since the Amiga application only requires 15-bit input this is not a problem.
  • A 3rd-order DAC found in Mark Watson’s Atari 800 repository. I’m not sure where it originally came from or what its copyright status is, since it’s not listed in Mark’s otherwise comprehensive list of which license applies to which files. The 3rd order DAC already attenuates the signal to maintain stability so I didn’t need to modify this one, except as detailed below.
  • Finally, the simplest form of my hybrid DAC.
Continue reading