Is anyone here interested in or involved in FPGA development?

I recently bought a Spartan-6-based Mojo clone off of Amazon for $not-so-much and have been having a lot of fun playing around with it, although as a traditional procedural programmer a lot of the concepts are mind-blowing.

Jeff.

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken, who indeed was a racist thereby proving himself right.

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I remember a while ago I looked at them (ended up getting an arduino instead) and was fascinated to what people where doing with them cloning vintage hardware and publishing their own chip emulations.

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I recently bought a Spartan-6-based Mojo clone off of Amazon for $not-so-much and have been having a lot of fun playing around with it, although as a traditional procedural programmer a lot of the concepts
are mind-blowing.

If you're familiar with HDLs such as VHDL or Verilog, it won't take you long
to get the hang of it.

On the other hand, if you're a programmer who's used to writing sequential code, it may take a little longer to get to grips with the paradigm; at the
end of the day, you're describing a circuit, not writing a program.

It's not rocket science - it can't be if I can do it - and you'll have a ton
of fun if you're willing to persevere for a while; I'd put tenacity up against talent any day of week :)

Best Regards

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hal wrote to Jeff <=-

I remember a while ago I looked at them (ended up getting an arduino instead) and was fascinated to what people where doing with them
cloning vintage hardware and publishing their own chip emulations.

That is the one thing that got me interested in them... watching people
boot a fully functional, earlier x86 on them.

I have not bought one, though. The one card I see the most talk about when it comes to DOS machines (I forget the name/brand) is a little more pricey
than I was interested in. Like, I could save up a little more and get
another UP Board instead.


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On 06 Mar 2021, hal said the following...

I remember a while ago I looked at them (ended up getting an arduino instead) and was fascinated to what people where doing with them cloning vintage hardware and publishing their own chip emulations.

Yeah, the applications for cloning vintage hardware are what currently have
me excited about it.

Jeff.

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken, who indeed was a racist thereby proving himself right.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A46 2020/08/26 (Raspberry Pi/32)
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On 06 Mar 2021, TALIADON said the following...

If you're familiar with HDLs such as VHDL or Verilog, it won't take you long to get the hang of it.

I am not, but am slowly learning. I went with Verilog. The board I have is essentially a Chinese-made Mojo 3 clone, and I also have the IO and
HDMI/SDRAM shields. The Mojo had its own IDE (still available) but also its
own HDL called Lucent. Given that the Mojo isn't supported anymore, I was reluctant to learn Lucent. However, I installed the Mojo IDE just to get it
to generate some UCFs for those expansion boards, and discovered that while
all of its wizards produce Lucent code, user-written code can be written in Verilog. (The Mojo IDE still uses the Xilinx ISE's toolstack, so any Lucent code gets converted to Verilog anyway.) Given that the free ISE is crippled
as to the IP cores it can produce and the Mojo IDE both has its own wizards geared toward hobbyist projects, can launch the ISE coregen program, and can upload to the board, that's what I'm using now.

On the other hand, if you're a programmer who's used to writing
sequential code, it may take a little longer to get to grips with the paradigm; at the end of the day, you're describing a circuit, not
writing a program.

Yeah, that's what I'm up against.

It's not rocket science - it can't be if I can do it - and you'll have a ton of fun if you're willing to persevere for a while; I'd put tenacity
up against talent any day of week :)

I am indeed having fun.

Thanks,
Jeff.

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken, who indeed was a racist thereby proving himself right.

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On 06 Mar 2021, Blue White said the following...

I have not bought one, though. The one card I see the most talk about when it comes to DOS machines (I forget the name/brand) is a little more pricey than I was interested in. Like, I could save up a little more
and get another UP Board instead.

The board I have is from Amazon, search "Taidacent FPGA" and it should come
up (It's the Spartan6, not the ZYNQ.) It's currently $49.99. It has an Atmel microprocessor on it that handles programming the FPGA, so you don't need any special cables or anything, just regular USB. The Spartan6 is an older-gen FPGA, so it uses the older Xilinx tools (and, optionally, the
now-discontinued Mojo IDE), but hey, it's $49.99. The same seller should have the IO board (lots of switches and lights, currently $45.98) and the
SDRAM/HDMI shield (HDMI in/out, 32MB RAM, currently $32.18).

Unfortunately, I don't think that the two shields are compatible with each other, so I don't think it's possible to have lots of lights and switches,
HDMI in/out, AND 32MB of RAM. I think that the IO shield would be good for a low-memory PDP11-inspired retro-computer, while the HDMI output and extra RAM would be good for a more substantial vintage recreation.

Opencores.org has a lot of processor cores, some which duplicate existing processors and some that are original creations.

Jeff.

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken, who indeed was a racist thereby proving himself right.

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Re: FPGAs
By: Jeff to All on Fri Mar 05 2021 10:34 pm

Is anyone here interested in or involved in FPGA development?

I would say I'm curious - not having heard about FPGA's until recently.

I have been researching the Terasic DE10(?) board and having it emulate a 486 to run an old BBS. I would also like to see if it can emulate an S/390 processor to be a mainframe as well...

One day when I'm cashed up, I might give it a go.

...ëîåï

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On 07 Mar 2021, deon said the following...

I would say I'm curious - not having heard about FPGA's until recently.

I have been researching the Terasic DE10(?) board and having it emulate
a 486 to run an old BBS. I would also like to see if it can emulate an S/390 processor to be a mainframe as well...

That would be awesome! I'm leaning more towards a 6502-based system, to begin with anyway? My current challenge is RAM. There's 64K of RAM on the FPGA, but
I also have some 128K standard memory chips and some 128K serial RAM and EEPROMS. The serial chips are slower, but much easier to work with as far as interfacing from the FPGA. QuadSPI should work up to 40Mbit/s, and that ought to be quick enough to work with a 6502 running in the single-digit-MHz range. Or at least I hope so; I haven't actually done the math yet.

Jeff.

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken, who indeed was a racist thereby proving himself right.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A46 2020/08/26 (Raspberry Pi/32)
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a 486 to run an old BBS. I would also like to see if it can emulate an S/390 processor to be a mainframe as well...

The problem with emulating the S/390 processor is ... even if you can you
then have to emulate all the other processors in the machine to get close to boot otherwise you have no I/O to disks/tape/screens etc. But if you do end
up emulating all of the chips then please make a youtube video of it.

There is the software option. MVS 3.8 runs fine with TK4- on a Raspberry Pi Zero with Hercules. As does VM370 and a host of other pre mid-80s mainframe operating systems.

I've heard of people emulating disk controllers with FPGAs in order to pull
the data off old disks we no longer have the disk controllers for. I think
that is how they managed to get the OS off the old Cray I.

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I remember a while ago I looked at them (ended up getting an arduino instead) and was fascinated to what people where doing with them
cloning vintage hardware and publishing their own chip emulations.

They also get used to accelerators too... I think off hand there's an Amiga accelerator thats uses one as the original CPU's won't go any faster. I suspect there's one in the offing for the Apple IIgs also as the 65c816's won't reliably do more than 14Mhz... talk of looking for 20Mhz at one stage, honestly not sure if the rest of a stock system will cope, but it'd have to slow down for I/O anyways.

Spec


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I remember a while ago I looked at them (ended up getting an arduino instead) and was fascinated to what people where doing with them
cloning vintage hardware and publishing their own chip emulations.

Forgot, taking it the other direction a few people have built simpler CPUs out of discrete parts. I know theres a 6502 version, trouble is, it doesn't even manage 1Mhz, so its really only any good for demo purposes.

If it could manage 1Mhz, I reckon it'd look spiffy with your Apple 2 with this thing mounted on the lid as the CPU. :)

Spec


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On 08 Mar 2021, Spectre said the following...

Forgot, taking it the other direction a few people have built simpler
CPUs out of discrete parts. I know theres a 6502 version, trouble is,
it doesn't even manage 1Mhz, so its really only any good for demo purposes.

If it could manage 1Mhz, I reckon it'd look spiffy with your Apple 2
with this thing mounted on the lid as the CPU. :)

This one claims to achieve 10MHz, using only 7% of the LUTs in a Spartan-3E Starter Kit: http://www.aholme.co.uk/6502/Main.htm

Jeff.

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken, who indeed was a racist thereby proving himself right.

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On 08 Mar 2021, Spectre said the following...

If it could manage 1Mhz, I reckon it'd look spiffy with your Apple 2
with this thing mounted on the lid as the CPU. :)

Arlet Otten's 6502 core seems to be very popular, and for good reason. Here's documentation on a 100MHz implementation based on that core: http://www.e-basteln.de/computing/65f02/65f02/

However, while the 10MHz design I mentioned in my previous post claims to be cycle/phase-accurate, this one does not. In fact, it says that "For purpose
of minimizing design, I did not keep the original cycle count. Most of the so-called dead cycles have been removed, except for one cycle in the PHx/PLx instructions, where this would have been too messy." (https://github.com/Arlet/verilog-65c02)

Jeff.

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken, who indeed was a racist thereby proving himself right.

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If it could manage 1Mhz, I reckon it'd look spiffy with your Apple 2 with this thing mounted on the lid as the CPU. :)

https://monster6502.com/

The discrete parts version was actually building it bigger... :) Or as they call it, a dis-integrated circuit... Unfortunately it only does ~50Khz

Spec


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On 08 Mar 2021, Spectre said the following...

https://monster6502.com/

The discrete parts version was actually building it bigger... :) Or as they call it, a dis-integrated circuit... Unfortunately it only does ~50Khz

Ah! My bad, I thought you were talking about an FPGA. My apologies.

THat said, I've read about the Monster6502; it's awesome! I think there's a (significantly less ambitious) kit for sale somewhere to do the same thing
with a 555 timer.

Jeff.

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken, who indeed was a racist thereby proving himself right.

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