Prism progress update

Just a quick update for now. LOTS has happened since I last posted though. LOTS more wiring has happened, mainly between the FPGA and the bus transceivers that I'm using to convert between the FPGA's 3.3v logic and the Z80's 5v logic.  I've also put prism into a case, wired in the twin SD Card slots, and wired up a power switch, power status LED and a reset button.

On the left are the two SD Card slots with their related activity LEDs. Next, there's two red "NMI" buttons. Following that are 3 switches - the first will control if FLASH or NVRAM is to be used on startup. The third is the FLASH ROM write protect and the middle switch will likely switch between ABC and ACB stereo for the AY, though I've not decided for sure yet. Finally on the right is the power switch, power LED and reset switch.

On the bottom left is the PCB with the SD Card sockets mounted. Above that is the PCB with the joystick, keyboard and mouse sockets on it (not currently wired in). Above that's the VGA socket. The rest of the PCB is as described previously (though with a lot more wiring completed and the battery socket added)

 

The four empty sockets on the right are for the main memory, Flash ROM and NVRAM. These have been temporarily removed during testing to avoid damaging them if anything goes awry... I've got quite a lot of the 32K SRAM chips I'm using as video RAM, which is probably just as well as the interface and interplay between the FPGA, Z80 and video RAM is the first thing I'm testing. I've sourced and ordered a small number of 20MHz Z80s too but will be testing with a spare 4MHz version.

 

Yes the wiring looks a little messy, but it was hard to come up with a tidy way of doing it! Each parcel of 8 wires from the bus transceivers are taped together to make it a little more managable.

 

As of last weekend, ZX Prism is outputting a test pattern to its monitor. The pattern is generated using simple logic and counters in the FPGA, but it proves that the video circuitry is working, the syncs are being correctly generated and the 12 bit colour is working courtesy of the resistor-DAC.

 

Simple test pattern..

FPGA + Z80 + Memory

Apologies for the radio silence to anybody still following progress on this project. The last few months I've been rather busy with other projects, and the progress on ZX Prism has mainly been on-paper; as per the previous post, I've redesigned ZX Prism to base it around a real Z80 instead of implementing the Z80 on the FPGA.

The design's been completed and I've started realising it in hardware. I'm using a cheap FPGA mini dev board which basically contains a Cyclone II FPGA, clock source, serial EPROM and breaks out all the IO to pin headers. They cost around $20 (about 10 quid). I chose this board as there's several vendors on eBay selling them cheaply and hopefully if all works out, that'll mean the project's more accessable for others.

The prototype so far - Z80 (top right), 29c040 512K Flash rom, 3 x 628512 (1 Meg RAM, 512K non volatile RAM), 2 x 61256 (64K video memory), AY 3 8912A sound chip, Cylone II FPGA dev board, 7 x 74245 level converters to convert 5v TTL signals to 3.3v as used by the FPGA and vice-versa.

Still a long way to go, but definitely getting somewhere!

Not dead, just resting!

Apologies for the lack of recent updates. Since the last update I've spent a lot of time rewriting the VGA handler so that it better matched Spectrum timings and also had enough clock ticks to create a bordered 512x384 pixl display. This was largely successful but I still could not get a lot of test software to work correctly - in fact most of it was still crashing upon loading. I've come to the conclusion that the soft-core z80 just isn't cutting it.

But I'm not giving up. Not at all! In fact, I've started work on a project similar to ZX Badaloc and Harlequin - a spectrum with an FPGA taking the place of the ULA (and much of the glue logic etc). Most of the work done thus far on the ZX Prism FPGA will be able to be reused. This has the added bonus that, with a minimum of hacking, the FPGA part would be able to be dropped into a "real" spectrum. Another bonus is that I'll be able to do a real edge connector without needing heaps of voltage conversion and FPGA pins...

I'm starting off with the CPU - I've got 10 a Mhz Z80A and a Z80 DMA chip. Once I get my GAL programmer working (or replaced), I'll effectively have a Velesoft Data Gear CPU daughterboard which can be tested on one of my Spectrum 128 machines....