Home » RBC Forums » General Discussion » Multicomp Cyclone IV (Preliminary design thoughts)
| Multicomp Cyclone IV [message #1009] |
Tue, 26 July 2016 07:16  |
dr_acula
Messages: 68
Registered: October 2015
Location: Adelaide
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Grant Searle's Cyclone II multicomp http://searle.hostei.com/grant/Multicomp/index.html is an amazingly versatile machine. I have had one running now for over a year without a reboot, collecting data from a radio network of arduino's and then talking to an ESP8266 and uploading data to the internet. CP/M, Wordstar (to write the program) and BDS C (to compile the program) are actually practical solutions for a real world problem.
But it is possible to run up against the limitations of the Cyclone II FPGA and the current design (being discussed on other threads) is 99% full. No room for any more serial ports, for instance. Max Scane and I have built several boards using the Cyclone IV FPGA and this has more pins and a lot more internal space for VHDL. Max has software that is compatible with both boards (and with some of the boards that use real Z80 chips too). However, with a similar number of pins to the Cyclone II, it is possible to still run out of pins.
This is a very early discussion on the possibilities of the Waveshare system. The complete package is very expensive http://www.waveshare.com/product/fpga-tools/altera/altera-bo ards/openep4ce10-c-package-b.htm and contains every peripheral you might want. But it is possible to buy the individual boards for prices that are competitive with similar Cyclone IV packages. It still is expensive, but prices will come down and peripherals can be made for low cost.
The package comes with a sdram board which has lots of capacity, but there are no drivers as yet. However there is potential to port over existing "sram to sdram" vhdl and make it look like something that us old-skool tinkerers understand - ie a data bus, address bus and /rd, /wr and /cs eg http://codehackcreate.com/archives/444
Meanwhile, I thought I would throw together a few peripheral boards that would enable someone to get Grant's project up and running with not much more than recompiling with the pin numbers changed. These boards may have mistakes, and are not perfect, but could be a useful starting point. I'm taking a punt and getting some made. One nice thing I like about the Waveshare system is they do have some sort of standard for peripherals. They have an 8 bit peripheral, which is 10 pins in a single row, 3V, 0V then 8 pins. Then there is a 16 bit peripheral which is 3V (in pairs), 0V (in pairs) then 16 pins. And a 32 bit peripheral that is the same.
I'd like to get a few more things working on these boards - in particular a touchscreen, and maybe audio, 16x2 LCDs, multiple serial ports for a true MP/M machine etc.
I have a crazy vision that CP/M can be expanded to something that is in color, with pictures, and even a GUI. But maybe that is a bit controversial...
Thoughts would be most appreciated.
Cheers,
James Moxham
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