This post has been a long time in the making. I’ve been distracted by various things: work, family, and CNC related projects. I will create a short post describing my first successfully completed CNC project after this one, since I’m pretty proud of it. But onto the topic at hand. The road to a video display began with a stand-alone breadboard… Read more »
After writing about building a 68020 computer I feel slightly silly for going back on my word: I have built up a 68008-based computer on breadboard. For one thing going right to a 68020 felt a bit like I’d be missing out; the pleasure is in exploring not the end result. I’d have left out on the other MPUs in… Read more »
It’s been a while since my last post. The main reason being a house move. On the plus side this is good for my projects as I now have lots more room to work on them. On the negative side, at least as far as my hobbies are concerned I’ve, somewhat unexpectedly, found myself doing some work for my old company…. Read more »
Looking again at the VHDL for my interrupt router, I realised that adding a priority encoder was fairly simple: Instead of being the masked and active interrupt lines, ROUTED is now the number (bit position plus one) of the active line. 0 is used as a special case: no interrupt lines, which are exposed by the mask, are active. This… Read more »
Construction of the MAXI09 is continuing. With each part soldered onto the board comes a limited amount of testing with the monitor. Enough to exercise the very basic level of functionality, nothing more. Proper testing, and actually making the part do cool things, will come later. The first part added was the OPL2: Since this was previously prototyped on breadboard… Read more »
After a wait of only about a week and a half, I have now received five MAXI09 PCBs from Botech. Here they are in the wallet: I was surprised at how much they all weigh! And the bottom: As you can see, they look great. Especially noticeable is the silk screen which is beautifully crisp and clear. After doing some… Read more »
I have finally solved the issue with holding multiple FPGA designs inside a single configuration flash. It seems there is a special tool just for the purpose of creating complex program files (.pof files). The details are buried in this document. So this is great news, though since I only have one PLCC84 adapter made up I won’t be able… Read more »
My last post was full of text, and therefore not very approachable. This post will hopefully explain some of my thoughts in a clearer way, with the diagrams and schematics (hopefully) doing most of the talking. First up here is the current, work in progress, system overview: (I tried looking for some nice online tools for making these kinds of… Read more »
This blog post is concerned with planning and, unlike pretty much all my posts to date, is not concerned with things I’ve actually done. My new computer is coming together nicely, at least in my mind and in some rough plans. Here is a list of what I hope will be the main hardware features: 6809 based (naturally) 512KB of… Read more »
After getting the FPGA test rig up and running, the next stage was to attach it to the 6809 SBC. This was critical if I am to incorporate one into the core of my next computer. To start with I utilised the 7 segment displays as an output latch. Since I had 16 bits of display (four seven segments) I… Read more »