Hi all,
"Does this new motherboard mean that it is going to be in direct competition with the Minimig and eventually kill it off?"
Not necessarily. MiniMig, like the FPGAARCADE board (whatever we call it) is just a platform to run the firmware on. The FPGAARCADE board is more flexible, and I also write the firmware for it so it will be more compatible eventually and run more systems. I am designing this board as I want a better platform to test the code I write on.
I had a chat to Dennis about this and we are both keen to keep a common codebase as much as possible. There will be some additions to the MiniMig firmware to make it work on my board, and hopefully most improvements will be picked up by the MiniMig build as well.
The FPGAARCADE board has an external 68K and the FPGA is big enough to fit an internal core. The idea is the first few boards will be fitted with the 68k and used to test the internal core. You can run both processors in lock step and see if there is any differences. They you can fix the softversion. Then you can not-fit the external 68K and use the softcore (which can be clocked faster). All the pins that the external 68K uses go to the expansion connector so they can be used as IO, or an external processor can be used. I maintain the T65 and T80 (6502/z80) cores on opencores, and this was the trick we used to bash out most of the bugs.
The AVR handles the SD card file system but all the processing is done in the FPGA. I need to do this to handle Atari disk formats as well.
Ethernet port is also going to be an option for the daughter board.
Cheers,
Mike.
