Category Archives: EightThirtyTwo

Of ByteBeat, weak linkage and compiler magic

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I recently came across some very interesting one-line programs, which generate some primitive music from simple logic expressions – a genre which has come to be known as “bytebeat”.

Being in need of a pointless-but-fun project requiring little to no concentration, I immediately wanted to play with these programs. Implementing the logic directly in an FPGA would be perfectly possible, but I actually chose not to this time – instead I wanted to compile them for the EightThirtyTwo CPU and run the sound through the four-channel DMA sound “chip” contained in EightThirtyTwoDemos (modeled very much after the Amiga’s beloved Paula chip!).

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JTAG and Tcl – twin rabbitholes!

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2022-03-29

I’ve been experimenting with the QMTech Kintex7 board, which provides a huge FPGA for a less huge amount of money. The one thing that prevents my existing projects from running on it without deep changes is the lack of SDRAM, but since I’ve been wanting to get more familiar with the Xilinx ecosystem for a while, this was a good opportunity to dive in.

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Masquerading as MiST

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Porting a Core, DeMiSTified – Part 5 – 2021-03-07

I’m not going to go into great depth regarding the substitute controller module which I’m using for this project, since I’ve covered much of that ground in previous posts (see the previous series about the ZPU-based control module, the TG68_MiniSoC project and also EightThirtyTwoDemos) – in all cases I have a soft CPU with a number of memory-mapped hardware registers, and I’m following much the same pattern this time around.

Briefly, I have a UART for serial debugging output, an SPI chip select register which allows one of several SPI channels to be selected, an SPI data transfer register, a simple interrupt controller, PS/2 keyboard and a simple timer in the form of a millisecond counter. I also have a joystick input register, since the controller will be responsible for relaying joystick events into the guest core.

So having created a CPU and peripheral module which we can connect to the guest core, all that remains is porting the firmware, yes?

Well…. no.

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Selecting a Candidate…

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Porting a Core, DeMiSTified – Part 1 – 2020-02-24

There are many FPGA cores out there which could be ported to the Turbo Chameleon 64 cartridge. In some cases it’s just a question of somebody doing the legwork, in other cases it gets a little bit more involved – but can we do anything to make the amount of work required more manageable?

Long-time readers will know by now that I don’t ask that kind of question out loud unless I already know that the answer is yes!

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Bug fixes and a new instruction…

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The EightThirtyTwo ISA – Part 23 – 2021-01-22

It’s been some time since I’ve made any significant changes to the EightThirtyTwo ISA, CPU or compiler backend, and this is mostly because I’ve been busy using it in real projects.

EightThirtyTwo’s original purpose, apart from the obvious learning exercise, was to be the supporting CPU in the AGA Minimig core for the Turbo Chameleon 64, and it’s performed this function quite nicely: it’s significantly smaller than the secondary TG68 used in the ECS core, and somewhat smaller than the OpenRISC cores that were used in some other Minimig variants, while using fewer memory blocks due to its logic-based register file and reasonably good code-density.

Nevertheless there are always bugs to be fixed and improvements to be made.

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The Totally Unscientific Code Density Competition!

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The EightThirtyTwo ISA – Part 22 – 2020-05-04

What better way to celebrate Star Wars Day than with a multi-CPU code density shoot-out?! (Well, OK, most people can probably name a dozen better ways without even trying – but this is how I’m choosing to spend it!)

I was curious to know just how well the code density of EightThirtyTwo code generated by the VBCC backend stacks up against other architectures, so I compiled a fixed codebase, namely the OSD control module from one of the many Minimig variants, targetting 832, m68k, MIPS, OpenRISC, RISC-V ARM, and even i386 and x86-64. The results make for interesting reading…

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Endian matters, linker libraries and constructors.

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The EightThirty Two ISA – Part 20 – 2020-04-03

I’m continuing to make gradual improvements to the EightThirtyTwo toolchain, and over the last few days I’ve given my attention to linker libraries, and endian issues.

While I initially intended EightThirtyTwo to be a big endian CPU, it occurred to me early on that I could make endian-ness configurable with a generic parameter. This I did, and having set that “littleendian” parameter to “true” for testing, I never actually changed it back, so all my testing over the last few months has actually been in little endian mode!

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