[Coco] FPGA CoCo's

[Dave Philipsen]

Well, that's good to know. It's a shame that Altera changed the memory 
and couldn't find a chip that is at least compatible with the old one.  
Unfortunately, Gary doesn't publish the source and I'm not sure he has 
time to keep up with it (although I don't know him personally nor have I 
communicated with him).  There isn't a lot of activity on the Yahoo 
mailing list but I hope he publishes a fix soon.  My board is probably a 
newer version since it doesn't work and I just bought it brand new.  
It's kind of a bummer since the primary reason I bought it was for the 
CoCo3 project.  Anyway, it will be handy for other things IF I can get 
this stinkin SRAM figured out.  It doesn't behave like most standard 
SRAMs and I frankly don't have that much experience with VHDL to figure 
it out.

Dave


On 5/21/2015 7:12 PM, Mark McDougall wrote:
> On 22/05/2015 9:52 AM, Dave Philipsen wrote:
>
>> My first attempt was unsuccessful.  The CoCo FPGA Yahoo group has the 
>> files
>> but the documentation really requires that you had been following the
>> project pretty closely.  I purchased a DE1 board, loaded up the flash 
>> memory
>> as the documentation apparently directs you to do, loaded the "sof" 
>> file and
>> I did get a screen that looked like a CoCo screen and even got a partial
>> Extended Basic boot message but the screen was full of garbage and I 
>> could
>> never figure out why it didn't fully work.
>
> TerASIC changed the memory part on the DE1 somewhere along the line 
> and CocoFPGA stopped working with the newer boards.
>
> Gary has re-written much of the core and is hoping to release a new 
> version that will work on all DE1 boards, with other improvements as 
> well.
>
> The DE1 is host to a relatively large number of retro micro FPGA 
> projects, including the C64, Amiga, Apple II, TRS-80 etc etc so I have 
> no doubt Gary will overcome the niggly issues with CocoFPGA.
>
> Regards,
>