Saturday, February 25, 2012

FPGA meets ARDUINO meets C64

I always wanted to make my own Joystick - so I decided to connect an Arduino UNO together with a JoyStick Shield to the FPGA64. I know, not really my OWN Joystick, but at least I can program it the way I like (e.g. configure one Button for "UP" for Jump'n'Runs, RapidFire, WiggleMode for Decatlon .....)

Further I added one more Bit to the Video-Output, so now we have 9 Bits (3 Bit for each color). Much closer to the real thing than before!





Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Small but important preparations

Nono, this project is still NOT stuck! Just the pace is a little down.

To achieve the next milestone (which is an expansion port), I need to switch to another FPGA Board with more I/Os. I already have one here, but as I always tend to overread specs, I missed that there is no SRAM, but only an SDRAM on this Board.

And no, I'm really not in the mood to write an SD-Interface. So I've ordered some SRAM-ICs which I will hook up later.

In the meantime, I was able to programm and read the Flash IC (CIF) on the Board. So all Roms (Kernal, Basic, Charset) are no longer occupying valuable BlockRam.

If everything goes well, I will have an expansion port up and running still on 2012 :-D