{"id":49,"date":"2012-04-28T22:38:56","date_gmt":"2012-04-28T22:38:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/retroramblings.net\/?p=49"},"modified":"2012-04-28T22:38:56","modified_gmt":"2012-04-28T22:38:56","slug":"minimig-on-the-de1-dev-board","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/retroramblings.net\/?p=49","title":{"rendered":"Minimig on the DE1 dev board"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my previous post I talked about FPGAs and the Minimig project.\u00a0 One of the platforms that has received a port of Minimig is the Altera\/Terasic DE1 FPGA development board<\/a>.\u00a0 This is a nice little board which comes with a Cyclone 2 FPGA, 8 meg of SDRAM, some SRAM, some flash and a controller chip to configure the FPGA at power-on.\u00a0 It also has an SD card slot, PS\/2 keyboard port, VGA out, an RS232 serial port, an audio codec, some switches, LEDs and a couple of 40-pin general purpose IO headers.<\/p>\n

The one downside to this board is that the FPGA is a bit poky, with only about 20,000 logic elements – only just enough to hold the Minimig design, and not large enough to hold the latest 68020 version of the TG68 softcore.<\/p>\n

The original DE1 port of Minimig can be found here<\/a>, while a fork which will hopefully see some new developments in the future can be found here<\/a>.\u00a0 Binaries are available, and also complete source if anyone’s else is interested in playing with it.<\/p>\n

While the DE1 board has a PS\/2 keyboard port, there’s no mouse port and (unsurprisingly!) no DB9 joystick ports – so these need to be added via an extra board connected to one of the GPIO headers.\u00a0 The source archives contain a suitable schematic, but since my circuit creation skills don’t yet extend beyond stripboard, I made a stripboard layout for the extra board. The layout and a couple of photos of the completed board appear below:<\/p>\n\n\t\t