[Coco] Howto for Altera DE1?

[Mark McDougall]

Steven Hirsch wrote:

> ..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.

Did you do a "chip erase" first?

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

You should be able to read out the contents of the flash using the control 
panel to a file and compare it with the image you programmed.

Also, Control Panel has a "Board Test" but I'm not sure what it does.

I would suspect that the problem isn't with the hardware. No offense meant, 
but as you will probably appreciate, there are a few manual steps involved 
and it's not too difficult to get something wrong along the way!

> 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?

I'll try to run thru this off the top of my head...

1. Program the DE1 Control Panel .SOF file into the FPGA via Quartus
2. Run the DE1 Control Panel software (under VMWARE etc)
3. Open the port.
4. Go to the FLASH tab, and do a chip erase. *** IMPORTANT ***
5. Select "File Length" check-box and then select "Write a File to FLASH" to 
program the ROM image (binary) at address 0.
6. You can now exit Control Panel etc..
7. Check that your DE1 switches are in the right position.
8. Configure the FPGA with the Coco3FPGA .SOF file.

You should then be right to go. I should note that occasionally I find that 
the Coco3FPGA will not hard-reset. I'm pretty sure it's because of corrupt 
vector RAM. In these cases, power-cycle the board and re-load the SOF.

I'm guessing I don't have to tell you that you don't need to program the 
flash with the ROM image each time.

If you want me to send you some DE1 .SOF files (Space Invaders, Pacman etc) 
email me off-list.

Good luck!

Regards,

-- 
|              Mark McDougall                | "Electrical Engineers do it
|  <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug>   |   with less resistance!"