July 2019

A Quick COLE-2 Status Update

It’s summer, and a particularly brutal one here in Michigan. My home office is not air conditioned, so I’ve been working on my projects a lot less. I have not been totally idle however, and so I’ve decided to give a brief update.

“I know engineers; they love to change things!”

Dr. McCoy, Star Trek: The Motion Picture

Video (Again)

Over the past few weeks I’ve grown very dissatisfied with the responsiveness of my current design. In fact, output to the VGA console is noticeably more sluggish than output to the serial port at 38.4k bps! This is largely due to the very slow interface between the CPU and the Propeller. I debated various solutions to this problem, and decided to re-implement the video and sound on a TinyFPGA.

You may recall that I’ve already dabbled with a custom VGA chip, and even had a partial prototype implemented on an Altera MAX V. The iCE40 chip on the TinyFPGA does not have a nearly as many I/O pins as the MAX V however. and so interfacing an external frame buffer is not feasible. What the chip does have, however, is 16 KB of dual-port block RAM directly on the chip. This simplifies the design considerably, at the expense of frame buffer size.

With only 16KB for the frame buffer, the graphics output will be less ambitious than my original goal. It will still have the 80×25 text mode, but graphics will be restricted to 160×120 in 16 colors. I may also add a 320×240 monochrome mode or a 320×200 4-color mode, depending on available logic resources (I do need some resources to implement sound at some point).

Finally, the new design will map the frame buffer directly into CPU memory, and run at full CPU bus speed. This will greatly improve the console’s performance, especially for scrolling.

Prototype Rebuild

The current prototype build is no longer as stable as it once was; the system will randomly reboot after an indeterminate amount of time. I have not spent much time trying to diagnose the issue, but I suspect some problem with noise on the reset line. Instead, I’ve decided to just tear the prototype down and rebuild it. The current build has had so much grafted onto it that the layout and wiring are an absolute mess, so this will be a great opportunity to clean things up and hopefully make the build more stable.

While I am rebuilding I will also be swapping out the GALs and one or two other pieces of discrete logic with a Lattice XC9572XL CPLD. This part comes in 44-pin QFP, which is still relatively easy to hand solder, and can also be easily adapted to a breadboard build. It’s also programmable from Linux with a Bus Pirate and a bit of work, so I can program the chip from the same machine where I do my other development work.

Since the XC9572XL is a 3.3V part I will need to drop the system voltage from 5V to 3.3V. This is actually going to make life easier, as I’ll no longer need logic level conversion to talk to the FPGA. It will still get me a maximum of 8 MHz, which matches up well with the speeds of my RAMs and flash ROM anyway.

Speaking of flash ROM, the one part of my build that is not 3.3V-compatible is the EEPROM. As it turns out, 3.3V parallel EEPROMs are not very plentiful, and don’t come in speeds faster than 200ns. So, for the new build, I’m going to switch to a flash ROM, specifically the SST39LF040. This will give the new build a whopping 512 KB of ROM operating at 70ns, which will be good to at least 7.1 MHz, and possibly the full 8 MHz.

The CPLD and flash ROM should be arriving later this week, so I am hoping to do some if not all of the rebuild over the weekend. Once the new build is done I’ll post another update with some pictures.