During some free time I ported the pacedev colecovision port to the MiST. I didn’t spend much time on it yet since I dunno if its worth. It seems that the colecovision didn’t got much attention in the past and thus not many games are available for it (and no scene demos).
Anyway here are the first impressions from a colecovision running on the MiST.
Sourcecode: https://github.com/wsoltys/pacedev/tree/master/sw/synth/platform/colecovision/mist
Till recorded the MA2601 running the oldskool demo Liquid Candy by noice.
Enjoy.
Finally the core is ready for prime. From the readme:
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Port of the A2601 FPGA implementation for the MiST ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Buttons: - right MiST button -> Start - Keyboard 1 -> Select - Keyboard 2 -> BW/Color (yellow led on = Color) - Keyboard F12 -> OSD to select roms from the sd card (needs extension .a26) Current limitations: - supports only the common Atari bank switching schemes - no illegal opcodes All MiST related files including the Quartus project files are in the 'mist' subdirectory. |
Sourcecode: https://github.com/wsoltys/tca2601
Binary: https://code.google.com/p/mist-board/source/browse/trunk/bin/cores/a2600
During my search for easy portable hdl sources for the MiST I recently stumbled upon the TCA2601 which is based on the Papilio Arcade port of the A2601 done by Retromaster. Since the Turbo Chameleon 64 and the MiST are similar devices I thought of giving it a try.
The port was more or less assigning the right pins and using the input methods for the MiST. The first launch already was a success because I saw Pitfall on the screen 🙂
Unfortunately the game didn’t looked like the screen shots found in the web. It had less colors and looked more like a dark yellow/white composition. I couldn’t find the reason and contacted Till about it and after a short time he found out that the Atari VCS had some external switches one of them for B/W or Color mode … dooh! 🙂
He found some other smaller issues which I committed to the repository as well.
Pitfall and other 2k/4k games were playable but had to be compiled into the core.
The next step will be to implement a OSD to choose the games from the sd card and upload it to the fpga. Till is cooking something together already and hopefully we have an usable Atari 2600 port soon with some limitations:
The source code can be found here: https://github.com/wsoltys/tca2601
The binaries will be here: http://code.google.com/p/mist-board/source/browse/trunk/bin/cores/a2600
Recently Till Harbaum added a PS2 converter for the MiST. Since the IO is handled by the ARM processor the exchange with the FPGA goes via SPI. This makes it difficult to use existing HDL sources because often a PS2 interface is assumed.
Grant’s multi computer tutorial expects a PS2 keyboard as well. With the new converter I gave the project another go.
Putting the sources together and connecting the required pins was easy but it didn’t worked out. I still wasn’t able to type something on the screen. I had a little mail exchange with Till and asked him if he sees some obivious error done by me.
He replied pretty quickly and found the problem. I drove the PS2 converter with the CPU clock and that was too much. I read in the converter sources that it needs a clock between 10-16 … kHz but I blindly ignored the kHz and used the cpu clock which was around 12 MHz. 🙂
After I added a simple frequency divider which I found here and used 12 kHz for the PS2 converter clock the keyboard worked and I was able to type in some simple commands.
Below is a crappy image taken with my mobile:
As usual the sources can be found in my github repository: https://github.com/wsoltys/multicomp