2008-07-26
I had to buy another USB jtag cable, because could not make the parallel cable to work on my laptop.
Besides that, I had to solder all pins of the cpld socket on the 8bitbaby board. After that, could programm the cpld.
This project is RIP for now. When I have some spare time, will try something else with cplds.
--x--
And... I got it to work. The 8bitbaby prototype can be programmed. But I still have a problem.
My main problem was find a way to program the CPLD on the 8bitbaby, because I had to solder all componnents myself, and... okay, I am rookie on soldering, and the thing did not work, and I did not kow if there was a problem with the jtag cables or with the board.
I really tougth I had damaged the componnents, but after all, made a last try and soldered all pins of the socket, and voilá... programed the EPM 3064 for the first time.
Time to go on and try something for real...
I want to insert the 8bitbaby into my MSX slot and make them interact someway...
Problem number 1: I forgot almost everything about the MSX hardware. And I did not know very much about it at first time.
Problem number 2: the 8bitbay does not fit inside the slot hole. It is too wide.
I found a bad cartdrige and decided to wire it up to the 8bitbaby. More wires, more solder, but I can test things quickly when time comes to plug the board into the MSX.
Here are some pictures of the cartdrige:
The Project
Blink some leds, when the MSX write to some memory address. Uau!
Basically, the VHDL code is something like this:
------------------------------------------------
entity msx_top is
port (
msx_clock : in std_logic;
led: out std_logic;
cs2_n : in std_logic;
a : in std_logic_vector(11 downto 0);
d : inout std_logic_vector(7 downto 0)
);
end msx_top;
architecture rtl of msx_top is
begin
process (msx_clock)
begin
if msx_clock'event and msx_clock = '1' then
if cs2_n = '0' then
if a = "000001000001" then -- 4000h
led <= d(0)
end if;
end if;
end process;
end rtl;
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I will be working on this in the next month...cough!!! days, and update this page.
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