{"id":43,"date":"2012-04-28T13:39:22","date_gmt":"2012-04-28T13:39:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/retroramblings.net\/?p=43"},"modified":"2012-04-28T22:39:24","modified_gmt":"2012-04-28T22:39:24","slug":"of-amigas-and-fpgas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/retroramblings.net\/?p=43","title":{"rendered":"Of Amigas and FPGAs"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a teenaged computer geek in the early 90s my dream was (of course!) one day to build my own computer.\u00a0 Fast forward a couple of decades, and there are now various ways in which nostalgic geeks like myself can actually fulfil this dream.\u00a0 One option is the Fignition<\/a> which is easy enough to build that a suitably-enterprising child<\/a> can do it!<\/p>\n

For someone more used to wielding a compiler than a soldering iron, however, another interesting option is an FPGA development board.\u00a0 (For the unitiated, an FPGA, or Field Programmable Gate Array, is a logic chip that contains thousands of logic elements whose functions are set at runtime, rather than in the factory.)<\/p>\n

Around 2005 there was ongoing discussion in the Amiga community about whether it was possible to implement a replica of the Amiga’s custom chipset in an FPGA.\u00a0 Dutch electrical engineer Dennis van Weeren answered that question by embarking upon the Minimig <\/a>project, which since then has evolved into an almost perfect re-implementation of the Amiga 500’s custom chipset.<\/p>\n

The classic Minimig board contains a Xilinx FPGA providing the custom chip functions, but contains a real 68000-variant processor.\u00a0 However, the chipset sources have been ported to other devices, too – most notably Tobias Gubener’s ports to the Altera DE1<\/a> and DE2<\/a> dev boards, and to the Turbo Chameleon 64<\/a>.\u00a0 All three of these ports make use of Tobias’s TG68 “softcore” processor, which is a 68000-compatible processor built from logic elements within the FPGA!<\/p>\n

Since all the FPGA projects I’ve mentioned so far are open-source, they provide a valuable library of source material for anyone wanting to experiment with FPGAs, and in the coming posts I will document my own experiments in case anyone finds them interesting, or useful starting points for their own endeavours.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a teenaged computer geek in the early 90s my dream was (of course!) one day to build my own computer.\u00a0 Fast forward a couple of decades, and there are now various ways in which nostalgic geeks like myself can … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-amiga","category-fpga"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/retroramblings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/retroramblings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/retroramblings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/retroramblings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/retroramblings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/retroramblings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57,"href":"http:\/\/retroramblings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions\/57"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/retroramblings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/retroramblings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/retroramblings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}