TG68 - The Open Source Minimig CPU into the FPGA

[xmag32]

Hi there,

just wanted to give props to Dennis and Tobi. Great work.
I'm AmigaFan and do VHDL programming as my daily business.
So I'm already following the minimig development for a while.
Unfortunately I don't have much time, so I didn't get to build myself a minimig board yet. I already thought about using
a development board. So that's great news, that someone already did it :-)
Have you seen the new Altera Nios2 Devkit, it's a CycloneIII based board and it comes with a nice Color LCD 800x600,
audio, vga, 32MB DDR, SD-CARD etc. And you can order it from resellers in
Europe :-)
http://www.altera.com/products/devkits/altera/kit-cyc3-embedded.html
Ok, it's a bit more expensive than the DE1 but cheaper than the DE2.
I think that's probably a good alternative.

Cheers, xmag

[xmag32]

Hi Henry,

the board is essentially the same as the Cyclone III Starter Kit. Altera boards got a quasi standard connector for daughter boards(HSMC). The daughter board includes the colour lcd and all the legacy ports, so you won't get around it, if you want to have the minimig running. I think it would be cool to have the minimig running on the colour lcd :-) The board is quite small. I've one in the office, but unfortunately without the daughterboard.

EDIT:
I just found out that Terasic has designed the daughter board for the starter kit. You can find it on the
terasic home page as "Nios II Embedded Evaluation Kit - Upgrade Package"

Cheers, xmag

[xmag32]

Hi Tobiflex,

don't you think it might be possible to just misuse the rs232
connector for the amiga joystick. I dont'know how many pins of the connector are wired to the fpga.

Cheers, xmag

[xmag32]

hm,

yeah you're right, I just took a view at the specs of the daughter board. I'm not sure to which pin's could be reused for the joystick. Where did you connect pin2/6 of the ps2 connector on the DE2? And are there any spare pin headers on the board. On the Cyclone III starter kit, one could use the pushbuttons as joystick replacement, but there are only four of them. So we're still missing the fire button.

EDIT: ok, took a look at the de2-specs, there are many spare pins. So that's definitly a plus for this board :-)

Cheers, xmag