TG68 - The Open Source Minimig CPU into the FPGA

[AJCopland]

I have a Sun-3/60 if anyone wanted actual hardware to compare an emulation against. It needs some love as it was pulled from a skip :lol: but there's nothing thats seems irreperably damaged.

Andy

[Dennis]

The cores for Tobiflex' ports to the Terasic DE1 and DE2 boards are now available for download at my
website

Have fun  :-D

[AJCopland]

Thanks Dennis & TobiFlex. Although I'm building Dennis' v1.1 MiniMig all of thise softcore cpu development is still extremely interesting and cool :-) Downloading them now and I've downlaod the core from opencores.org!

Andy

[MiniMorph]

Well done Tobiflex and Dennis.

A Historic day in the Retro FPGA world to see such a fantastic  core that runs on a virtually unmodified PCB that only costs 150 USD. Minimig's for all now

When the RTL is released too, I will try and port it to my two Xilinx boards and pass them back to Dennis for his page.

Those boards are not as good as the Altera ones for this core as they do not have an SDCARD slot. The Xess one only does 512 colours too, but this can be fixed by adding three resistors I guess !

In the meantime I WILL order a DE1 for sure now.

Is there any preference on type of mouse that is needed ?

In the meantime a slightly less important thing will be happening tomorrow when the Dev boards for my MiniMorph boot loader will arrive. I will be one step closer to adding Ethernet to the Minimig.

Dennis wrote:
The cores for Tobiflex' ports to the Terasic DE1 and DE2 boards are now available for download at my
website

Have fun  :-D

EEEEEEEXCELLLENT!! GREAT WORK!!

[MiniMorph]

I have just ordered 5 Altera DE1 boards from Taiwan.

I will sell a couple of them on in the UK if there is interest. I could sell them privately or on Ebay.

I could probably do the mouse keyboard mod on the boards and I will see if I can get some y cables as well. I will need then anyway.

Good news for my boot loader too. My development boards for that arrived today. I can actually run some code now !

[AJCopland]

MiniMorph wrote:
I have just ordered 5 Altera DE1 boards from Taiwan.

I will sell a couple of them on in the UK if there is interest. I could sell them privately or on Ebay.

I could probably do the mouse keyboard mod on the boards and I will see if I can get some y cables as well. I will need then anyway.

Good news for my boot loader too. My development boards for that arrived today. I can actually run some code now !

Good to hear that your project is coming along, will you be sharing the re-design as you go or just at the end once you've worked all of the kinks out? I'm just getting to grips with gEDA (never used schematic software before) and trying to get everything setup correctly with the minimig sym files etc then trying things out in baby steps.

On a side note, damn this stuff is complicated when you're newbie, does anyone know of any good introductory guides!?! I've got it mostly installed and setup on Ubuntu, got the custom sym files from Dennis' site loading in ok and seemt o have teh schemtic loading with all of the components but an actual guide to using gEDAs gschema tool would be nice.

Andy

[downix]

AJCopland wrote:

MiniMorph wrote:
I have just ordered 5 Altera DE1 boards from Taiwan.

I will sell a couple of them on in the UK if there is interest. I could sell them privately or on Ebay.

I could probably do the mouse keyboard mod on the boards and I will see if I can get some y cables as well. I will need then anyway.

Good news for my boot loader too. My development boards for that arrived today. I can actually run some code now !

Good to hear that your project is coming along, will you be sharing the re-design as you go or just at the end once you've worked all of the kinks out? I'm just getting to grips with gEDA (never used schematic software before) and trying to get everything setup correctly with the minimig sym files etc then trying things out in baby steps.

On a side note, damn this stuff is complicated when you're newbie, does anyone know of any good introductory guides!?! I've got it mostly installed and setup on Ubuntu, got the custom sym files from Dennis' site loading in ok and seemt o have teh schemtic loading with all of the components but an actual guide to using gEDAs gschema tool would be nice.

Andy

I've been having an issue getting gEDA to read the gerber files myself.

[MiniMorph]

I will share the code for the Minimorph Loader when it does useful things. I will be making both binary builds and the source code available.

It is some way off being useful. I am unsure how much work will be involved in modifying Tobiflex's design to be more like the Original Minimig where it communicated with the PIC. I need the SDRAM and 68000 core from Tobiflex's design but set up to talk to an external boot loader like Dennis's design.

[freqmax]

@AJCopland:
Try: http://www.geda.seul.org/docs/current/tutorials/gsch2pcb/tutorial.html

'gerbv ..' is the tool to view gerbers btw.

[AJCopland]

downix wrote:
I've been having an issue getting gEDA to read the gerber files myself.

I haven't got that far yet :-D might try that tonight since I seem to be too ill for going out and partying like Plan A had me doing :-(

Once I've had a go I'll report back. Will be happy if i can just get it to load up the schematic and all the syms correctly etc allowing me to edit things. My reasoning is that if I get each prior stage in the process to work then each subsequent one _should_ just fall into place.

I'm optimistic by nature like that :lol:

Andy

[AJCopland]

@freqmax
Thanks mate!

I just realized we have a nice pile of free DE2s here at school.

I gotta try this out!

[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

[HenryCase]

xmag32 wrote:
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.

Xmag32, the Nios2 does sound like a good board. Is that colour LCD included in the price, or can you buy the board without the LCD screen?

[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