So Close!

Here’s my Cyclone III board nearly running the Minimig core.  For it to be getting as far as this error message means it’s correctly loading and running the OSD firmware from the SD card.  I just have some SPI bugs to iron out, but after that I hope it’ll actually run, and then I can figure out how to give the emulated Amiga access to more of the 32 meg of RAM this board contains.

What will be very interesting is to see whether this version suffers from the same build-to-build stability problems that plague the Chameleon port of the core (since hardware-wise it’s almost identical).  Once again, my ultimate goal is to have multiple ports of the core buildable from a single source tree.

6 thoughts on “So Close!

    • I don’t think there have been any further bugfixes with the DE1 port’s SD card access since your post at the Minimig forum. As soon as either Chaos or I find a card which exhibits the same problem as yours, we can try to fix it.

      The flash RAM address is determined by SW5 on the DE1’s front panel – either 0, or 2mb. (0x200000). Note that you’ll need to erase the flash before programming it.

  1. I can’t find the file that I am supposed to flash in your source directory tree….
    When I ran some of the t68k stuff I get a garbled output on the screen but can read across the middle “This is a just a quick test to see….” and white noise out the audio port…couldn’t recompile the source either…some errors came up…(this is from the part10 source code)

    oh well…would be exciting to get it working though.

    • Which SDRAM chip does your DE1 have? Mine has a Zentel, and it’s possible that my SDRAM controller doesn’t work on the other type found on the DE1 (ISSI?)

      I don’t actually use the flash on the DE1 – there’s a small firmware file built into the .sof file, which the project uses to bootstrap from SD card.

      The white noise is normal – it’s just the VGA controller displaying the RAM contents before anything’s been written there. What you need to do is copy the CFirmware/boot.sre file to SD card – hopefully the project will pick it up from there.

      • My SDRAM is Zentel 60ns as well…but the project does the same thing on all three of my DE1’s…the other two boards have (PSC) at 70ns I think…

        I am thinking that it might be my HARD DISK file…maybe I will try making two partitions like yours and see if it works.

        As always, thanks!

        We do have an FPGA class here at the school but they use Xilinx…I just thought this DE1 seemed like a great platform to learn on…so I guess I will just go through the tutorials on the CD and some of those free online course materials for now…

        I have really been wanting to do this for a while now…can’t learn how to swim without getting wet…hehehe

  2. As for the SD-Card error…I think it was narrowed down to the hard disk image used…somehow some of the images that I made with WINUAE didn’t work after I formatted and tried to use them in the DE1…

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