Close

Stand-alone booting capability

A project log for TMS9900 compatible CPU core in VHDL

Retro challenge 2017/04 project to create a TMS9900 compatible CPU core. Again in a month... Failure could be an option...

erik-piehlErik Piehl 12/30/2017 at 19:110 Comments

An update after a long last!

The next step for the design is to make the FPGA system stand-alone, i.e. able to boot and operate without a host PC. A USB connection will still be needed, but only to provide power. Today I implemented a new feature, where after reset the FPGA logic will load 256K of data from the SPI flash ROM to the SRAM of the system. That allows the system get the TI-99/4A system ROMs and GROMs to the static RAM in appropriate places. After the download one of the DIP switches controls the CPU's automatic boot - if switch zero is set the CPU in the FPGA will automatically boot and start executing the code that was transferred to SRAM.

The 256K of data is divided into three regions:

The Pepino board has 1M of static RAM overall. I had forgotten that the board has actually 16 megabytes of SPI flash storage so there is plenty of potential here.

The design of the SPI flash interface is from Magnus Karlsson, the designer of the Pepino FPGA board. I used the code from his Mac Plus example, and modified the code for my purposes. His code is written verily while my code is in VHDL, so I wrote the standard VHDL component header to enable me to interface the Verilog code from VHDL.

Discussions