[Coco] Howto for Altera DE1?

[Steven Hirsch]

On Mon, 28 Jun 2010, Steven Hirsch wrote:

>> The Control Panel application communicates with the Control Panel firmware 
>> in the FPGA to provide "low level" functions like directly accessing 
>> on-board devices such as SRAM, Flash, LEDs etc. Just to make it perfectly 
>> clear, it has nothing what-so-ever to do with Quartus or any other Altera 
>> development tools. It was developed specifically for the DE1 by TerASIC.
>
> Hmm.  There may be an additional bit of disconnect on my part.  What exactly 
> is the correct target for the ROM image?  I was assuming it to be the onboard 
> configuration ROM.  Are you actually referring to a removable SD card?
>
> Is an SD card required for proper operation of coco3fpga?
>
>> If you asked nicely enough, I might be able to find the time to munge one 
>> of my existing projects into something like the above. :) In the mean-time, 
>> I can ask around to see if anyone has something suitable.
>> 
>> BTW AFAIK, no-one has had any luck running the Control Panel application 
>> via WINE either... :(
>
> I'm sure it will run fine under VMware.  But, I really need to understand 
> what the proper resting place is.

..and it did.  I brought up the control panel app under VMware and copied 
what I believe is a proper coco3 rom image (32KB) to "flash" memory.

Then, fingers crossed, I loaded the coco3fpga .sof file.  The board reset 
and... bingo! A screen full of green and purple garbage.  Same result I've 
been seeing all along.

So, where to start?  Do I have a bad DE1 board?  Is there some sort of 
assurance test for the onboard memory and ROM?

Maybe I need to be walked this step by step without any assumptions about 
what I might or might not know to do and in what order?

Steve


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