A Clockport for the Chameleon64’s Minimig?

Christian Vogelgsang, who a couple of years ago collected together the git repository of Tobias Gubener’s Minimig_tc64 project and ported the OSD menu code to GCC – thus sparking my interesting and subsequent foray into the world of FPGA development – has been hard at work once again!  This time he’s succeeded in adding support for the Chameleon’s clockport to the Minimig core, which means that in theory a good proportion of clockport peripherals should now be usable!

So far it’s only been tested with a Silver Surfer card – it will be most interesting to see which cards work without any further changes, and which prove to be troublesome.

Links to source, binary and details of a small hardware hack required can be found on Chris’s blog – but before downloading and trying them take note that

THIS MUST NOT BE USED WHILE THE CARTRIDGE IS PLUGGED INTO A C64.

The IO mux code has been stripped right down to bare bones to give usable clockport performance, and the synchronization with C64 bus cycles is no longer present, so a connected C64 will definitely crash, and may even be damaged.

With that warning in mind, do check out his work here: http://lallafa.de/blog/2013/09/a-clockport-for-chameleon64s-minimig/