Experimenting with TG68

Part 11 – porting to the Turbo Chameleon 64

After porting the Minimig core to my ebay-acquired Cyclone III board, I’ve spent some time this week porting the MiniSOC project to the Turbo Chameleon 64.

Hardware-wise the TC64 is very similar to the CIII board – the FPGA is identical, and there’s the same amount of SDRAM – albeit with a slightly different layout – so porting projects from one to the other is fairly straightforward.  The only complicated part is routing certain signals through a CPLD which is used in the TC64 to multiplex some of the IOs, and as a bonus, to provide 5v tolerance.  This is taken care of in the Chameleon-specific toplevel, meaning once again that the same basic source tree can be built for DE1, the CIII board and now also the Turbo Chameleon 64. Continue reading

New Amiga games in 2012? Yes indeed!

When I returned to the Amiga scene about a year ago I was amazed to see just how much interest and development there is for retro systems  –  it appears I’m far from alone in believing that computers took a wrong turn back in the 90s!

New games are still being written for a wide variety of retro platforms, and the Amiga is no exception.  Spotting the need for a central hub to highlight new releases, Robert Hazelby has just started a new Blog – Amiga Gamer.  If you’re interested in hearing about new Amiga releases, be sure to check it out.

The Minimig core in action

I needed a bit of a break from wrestling with timing constraints and trying to figure out how to make the core stable from build to build, so figured I’d make a video of the Minimig core in action.  This is the first time I’ve used this particular camcorder, so forgive the shaky camerawork!