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Author Topic: Spin, Propeller, and MCUs  (Read 6687 times)

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Offline mikronauts

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Re: Spin, Propeller, and MCUs
« on: July 25, 2013, 01:39:14 AM »
Iggy,

I just joined this forum very recently, and I was pleased to find your post :)

Thank you for liking my Morpheus design! (and also finding PropCade)

I have rev.2 Morpheus PCB's now with some additional features... unfortunately my site is sadly out of date as consulting and family come first. I also had to put Largos on the back burner.

Morpheus now has a lot of graphics drivers, including 320x240 256 colors
per pixel, with sprites, signaled as 640x480 VGA, as well as VGA/SVGA/XGA with 4 colors per pixel (separate palette for each scan line)

You can program propellers now in Spin, assembly language,
C, C++, Forth, various versions of Basic and more.

Actually, my days with the Amiga inspired me to create Morpheus.

I picked up Amiga Forever today!

Maybe I should dig out my Amigas (two A1000's, one signed by Jay Miner) and an A500... but wifey might kill me if I set up any more computers & monitors... better just run Amiga Forever on PC's....

Quote from: Iggy;706185
I've been studying the idea of using MCUs to emulate older computers or as substitutes for glue and I/O circuitry.
 
Right now one of my favorites is the Parallax Propeller.
http://www.parallax.com/propeller/
 
Its a 75-100MHz 8 core 32bit MCU.
Each core acts as a 'cog', has video generation capability, and is seperately programmable.
 
So far, users have programmed the Propeller to do useful things like generate VGA signals, interpret PS/2 keyboard and mouse input, and emulate a SID chip.
 
Currently, a group of developers is working to emulate a C64.
 
I'd like to work with this chip alone AND combined with older CPUs (like the 6809, 6309, 68K, and Coldfire).
 
This is the board I'm starting with:
http://www.mikronauts.com/morpheus/
 
Dual Propellers and enhanced memory.
 
My first project will add a 63C09E, some static RAM, an SD card reader, and a serial port to the system.
 
I'd like to incorporate dual SID emulation as well.
 
Eventual the Morphues board will support a 256x192 256 color screen mode with sprites.
 
It already supports much higher resolutions (although with fewer colors).
 
I can program the Morpheus with Parallax's own Spin under Morpheus' built in OS Largos.
 
So, eventually, I hope to have a system that will marry the 6309 specific NitrosOS9 operating system with some very capable MCU hardware and software.
 
What do you think?