Using C64 Core on MiniMig boards.

[TheDaddy]

@everyone

Please make a C64 core for the Minimig.

It would be great! Have tohe choice of loading C64 or Amiga games!

The way I see it:

A C64 core
An Atari ST core
A ZX Spectrum core

This would be absolutely awesome!

Imagine how many people you can attract to the Minimig :-)

[jensl]

I have asked Peter Wendrich(the author of the C64 core)
to port the code to the Minimig.

He told me that he doesn't have a Minimig, so he can't make a port.

I would donate him a Minimig, but I have at the moment only parts for my own Minimig.(only one blank PCB)
I hope that Illuwatar will finish his Board design so I can buy from him some blank Boards.

Jens

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Hm, I think oscillator timing will be an issue.

[Palm]

Peter at Illuwatar also sells pre-soldered boards. I bought one from him a few days ago, so he is definitely shipping :-)

If someone can make a working c64 core and continue to develop it, I fure sure would be part of donating.

Anyone ?

[alexh]

There are several open-sauce FPGA cores which work (i.e. fit) on MiniMig v1.1

CPC-TREX
FPGA-64 v0.27
A few Arcade games
MSX II
Sinclair Spectrum
ZX80/ZX81

These are just a few I've played with over the months. With the exception of CPC-TREX (which is written in AHDL and needed converting) all were easy to add a MiniMig I/O wrapper.

Although I never tried it there is also an Atari ST in the form of Suska which should fit although may need a different xtal.

The SD Card I/O and the PIC is harder ;-)

I'll happily walk someone through the process if anyone feels like being a MiniMig HDL coder?

[Palm]

That is good news. What need now is some kind of a bootloader for which core to load. Is this possible to make using the onboard PIC ? It kinda sucks to have to swap SD card just to boot different cores :-)

It would be like the old days with the disk-boxes. But instead of disks, we have SD cards Imagine how small a sexy that box would look hehehe...

Espen

[TheDaddy]

Someone set up a bounty for the following:

C64 core to the Minimig
Atari ST core to the Minimig
ZX Spectrum core to the Minimig

I am willing to donate :-)

[Palm]

Dude, me too. Right away

Who sets up bounties. And what should it be. I guess C64 core would be most appreciated ? What do you  think ?


Espen

[alexh]

It kinda sucks to have to swap SD card just to boot different cores :-)

It is easily possible but why? What is wrong with the One SD card = one core (plus all the games). I see no problem at all? Especially as 2Gig SD cards are £3.50 each at Tesco! This is certainly a feature request to put at the bottom of the to-do pile.

What is more-likely to suck is that there is very little scope in the PIC for multi-platform support and in my experiments I had to re-program the PIC using the serial cable between cores. (But I wasn't really trying to get a single all-singing all-dancing PIC)

[mikej]

Peter's C64 core has already been ported and runs on my standard Spartan3e board (we have been chatting for a while). I haven't released the port on fpgaarcade as I'm waiting to include a highly accurate SID port - and it needs the DDR RAM controller which is not quite finished yet. The Replay (fpgaarcade) dev board will run multiple cores out of the box, including my VIC-20 core (also available on C-one) and my ST core.

There is no reason Peter's core would not run on the original Minimig board. You just need to change to top level wrapper file to get the correct IOs. It would also need some work to get the tape or cartridge interface to talk to the SPI connection to the SD card.

More info is available on the SID and VIC2 chips thanks to Michael's very impressing IC die scans :
http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/neu/6581.html

/Mike

[TheDaddy]

1) C64 Core (I don't mind if you have to have it on one SD Card, a 512MB SD Card should do with all the games and the core on)

2) Atari ST

3) ZX Spectrum

These would make the Minimig a superb multi console/computer station :-)

[Palm]

Allright, I can for sure live with different SD cards for different cores. If a C64 Core would be released, i am totally for that.

Is there anyeone who has tried to load a c64 core to the minimig ? Is there a way to join up for such a task ?

Maybe a some kind of a wiki for the minimig and other FPGA solutions would be nice. To collect all info in one place.


Espen

[Palm]

Would it be possible to use the core of a C64DTV if it could be extracted somehow

[mikej]

probably. We have been working on the code for the Atari Jaguar and un-released Atari Jaguar2 for a while.....

[Palm]

So, what is the major difference between MiniMig and your board ? I am just curious. Which one is most modular in design to be able to use most cores which are available/will be available ?

Seems to me that the "future" are FPGA boards which are generic in design being able to run all sorts of cores of old machines. Just a big question remaing:

-Which board wins the race.
-Which is the best and has the right price
-And which one gets most users.

I would love that MiniMig, FpgaArcade and other FPGA-board developers kind of teamed up somehow so that most cores either works on all boards, or that the board-developers try to make them boards compatible with eachother as much as possible so that the users gets to enjoy all the different cores around.

I do believe that for the MiniMig developers, they are interested in getting as much running on its board as possible, to pull users. And I believe FpgaArcade developers wants the same :-)

So, can someone list pros and cons for MiniMig and fpgaArcade (and other spartan3 boards ?) so that we can compare them ?



Espen

[mikej]

The FpgaArcade (now called Replay) board has the following :

Large Spartan3E device (1200). 3x minimig size
Expansion connector for real processor or other IO (like a real SID) / Ethernet. 68K daughter board already designed to test the 68K soft core. I can't remember the exact number, but it's got about 100 IO pins and another 30 odd input only pins plus some clocks and power on the expansion connector.

ARM micro controller for hardfile support + USB.

24 bit DVI(HDMI) output + analogue output.
Good quality Wolfson audio DAC.
32 MByte memory.

SVHS/Composite video (on tiny expansion board)

small form factor (17cm x 8cm) and fits in an ITX case.
External input connectors for wiring joysticks / buttons up in an arcade machine.

It has been a long time in development, as I keep adding bits to it. It was completely finished and ready to be manufactured before we decided to move from the AVR to the ARM controller. Should be done in another week. Price is unknown but will become clearer once I get the first batch made.

The reason I designed this board was so I can run the game cores I develop. I did the vic-20 core used on C-one and I have a cycle accurate ST chipset. I also debugged and maintain the T65 and T80 CPUs used in a lot of projects.

Any board is only as good as the software and firmware support - without this it doesn't do much. I'm an FPGA engineer, so I will continue to support the Amiga and other cores on this platform. Other people can continue to port them to other boards if they wish. Most of the emails I get are people having problems getting things to work on other boards, so having one "reference" board will from my point of view save me a lot of time.

What it will do is boot multiple environments from the OSD menu. An environment includes ROMs and the FPGA image. The ROM files are copied over to the memory at startup. You can then select a run-time image, either a floppy or later a hardfile image the FPGA can access while it is running.

My aim for platforms (initially) :
(working code exists for all of these on my other boards)

Amiga A500 - Minimig core + Mike memory controller
Atari ST - Mike + Wolfgang)
Vic20 - Mike
C64 - Peter + Mike SID
Spectrum
BBC B
Bally Astrocade
+few others

Pacman / Pengo
Frogger / Scramble
Defender
Asteroids
StarWars
Spaceinvaders


/Mike