2019-03-21

I found out recently that there is now a second version of the Turbo Chameleon 64 cartridge for the Commodore 64. The reason for this is, apparently, that the Cyclone III FPGA that was used in the original design has been superceded and is difficult to obtain at affordable prices. For this reason Individual Computers have redesigned the cartridge to use a Cyclone 10 FPGA instead. The model chosen is essentially the same thing in a different package, so porting cores would simply be a case of recompiling with the new device and pinout as the target – except they’ve also taken the opportunity to make small improvements to the design. For this reason it now takes a little bit of work to port existing cores to the V2 hardware.

I now have an initial build of the Minimig core for V2 hardware, which is available as before on the Minimig TC64 Snapshots page.

Edit: Since the V2 hardware is likely to attract newcomers to the Chameleon platform, I should explain what to do with the two files in the snapshop archive:

• The fampiga_tc64v2.rbf file is the core itself, and needs to be flashed into the Chameleon cartridge using the Chaco utility.
• The OSD_CA01.sys file is the firmware for the secondary CPU core that runs the menu system and disk emulation, and needs to be written to the root directory of an SD card. The card will also need to contain a Kickstart image, named kick.rom

Another point to bear in mind is that the core doesn’t yet attempt to translate the C64 keyboard to the Amiga – so far just the run/stop key is used to toggle the OSD – so you will need a PS/2 keyboard to use the core for anything that requires keyboard input.

Source is availabe, as before, on github.