2020-12-10

It occurred to me recently that there is a lot of history in the Minimig project, with many people making important contributions over the course of some 15 years.

It also occurred to me that as developers come and go, and new users encounter the latest Minimig cores without having seen what came before, there’s a real danger that some of that history will be forgotten.

2020-09-22

I’ve just released an updated version of the MinimigAGA core for all three of my current target platforms – TC64 version 1, TC64 version 2, and MiST.

The core doesn’t have 100% feature parity between the three platforms, since the MiST has an onboard microcontroller to handle input and storage, while the Chameleon doesn’t. Having to implement an equivalent microcontroller in the FPGA makes some things harder – but other things easier.

For this reason, this time around the TC64 ports have a feature not yet available on MiST – experimental floppy drive sounds. To enable this, simply copy the drivesnd.bin file onto the SD card. If you don’t like it, just delete the file again – there isn’t (yet) a way to turn it on and off from the menus.

Other changes this time include the addition of a very basic LED Audio filter implementation – not accurate, but just good enough to make the going-through-tunnels sound effect in Lotus II work, and Slingshot on Atari-Forum has put some hard work into debugging the CPU core, and found an issue with stack frames which was preventing certain Graftgold games from working in ‘020 mode. His fixes to the CPU are included.

I’ve also made some timing tweaks on all three platforms so that all of them build with clean timing reports.

Turbo Chameleon 64 users can find the latest version of the core here

MiST users can find the latest version of the Minimig core at the official MiST binaries repository.

2020-09-12

After porting the MiST’s Minimig core to the Turbo Chameleon 64, I spent happy few weeks adding extra features including, most notably, RTG support. A number of people have kindly supported me in this endeavour, both directly via PayPal and also on Patreon – and I’m very grateful for this support.

None of this would have been possible without building upon the MiST’s AGA core, though, so it seems only right that I should port my improvements back to the MiST.

2020-07-12

If it’s seemed quiet here lately, that’s because I’ve been hard at work improving the Turbo Chameleon 64 ports of the Minimig core.

The two main features added since the last release are an experimential implementation of the Akiko Chunky-to-Planar converter which can be used by a handful of games to increase video performance, and an experimental P96 retargetable graphics driver.

2020-04-02

Over the last few days I’ve been attempting to replace the OpenRisc control CPU within the DE1 and DE2 Minimig cores with EightThirtyTwo – and it’s fighting me every step of the way!

Firstly, why do I want to do this? It’s a long story…