"The Thing"… (STM32F103 + EP2C5T144C8N)

Hi all,
this is the new board I’m currently working on (currently I’m making some refinements to the PCB before sending Gerbers to a service):

It is the “evolution” of my previous CPLD Fun Board, using a cheap Cyclone II FPGA and making it “compatible” with the Multicomp. So it will be easier to emulate into the FPGA CPU like Z80, 6502, 6809…. (and using it as a stand-alone retro-PC too…)

The STM32 is used as “stimulus generator” for the FPGA, or can be used as I/O processor connected to the FPGA. Of course with the stm32duino bootloader inside…

I’ll post here more info after some testing… (I’m very curious to see how it will go… )

Just tested the STM32 MCU part. Now I can compile and upload using Arduino IDE with the USB! (but this is the easy part…).
Now starting with the FPGA…
Hoping to have more results before this forum will shut down…

Cool project.

Is the aim that you will be able to import ‘off the shelf’ cores into the FPGA?

I’ve spent a bit of time looking at Amiga FPGA boards, but ultimately did not purchase after UAE reminded me how limited the Amiga system was

[BennehBoy – Fri Jan 11, 2019 4:10 pm] –
Is the aim that you will be able to import ‘off the shelf’ cores into the FPGA?

Yes… it can be used as a “normal” FPGA board having usual stuff like leds, keys, 7-segments display and can run “multicomp” softcores having the needed HW. It requires only to remap some pins assignment in the Quartus II “pin planner” because I’ve changed the positions of some pins for a better PCB routing. It’s only a 5 minutes task having the correspondence on a excel file…
And it has also an “on-board” STM32 Arduino (Maple mini compliant) to play with, with its own GPIO connector…

Tested the first Multicomp SOC (6809 CPU, Basic ROM, 2KB internal RAM, VDU, PS/2 Keyb.)!!

Next step is to test the SD and the external SRAM…

Brilliant

Minus 1 point for miss-spell of “is”.

I’m joking, I love FPGAs.

[MoDu – Fri Jan 18, 2019 5:36 pm] –
Minus 1 point for miss-spell of “is”.

I guess the first program to write for the stm32f103 is a spell checker for the keyboard

Nice work! +2 to make up for the minus MoDu gave you

Guys… if you had seen me in what conditions I was while I was writing… It’s a miracle that I missed only one key…

Short video “running” a Z80 Multicomp with a color VDU:

BTW: this time the spelling should be correct…

Ooh, looks like a 380Z

Just to end this thread (probably last one here… ) I’ve done a page on this “project” here, where I’ll publish all the details including PCB gerbers and Multicomp examples (with the related SD images).

May be I’ll do others versions with a faster SRAM or using a Cyclone IV with more LEs…