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Flash Programming Pod
10/31/2017 at 01:25 • 0 commentsSo, I built a small "pod" to program the flash chip, using an ESP8266. The "right" way to do this would be by modification of the FPGA and by using the serial port, but I don't know how to do that; this, I know how to do. "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".
This pod is ESP8266 (ESP-12E, 4MB flash) based. If you press the button within 5 seconds of power on, it goes into Wifi mode; you connect to the access point and then you FTP a "file.bin" image to it. Then, reboot, and AFTER 5 seconds, you press the button and the flash chip is erased and programmed. Ugly code so far, but it works. Later, I'll make it entirely wireless with Telnet and OTA.I used an assembler (capable of images >64K in size, specifically, NASM, an x86 assembler) to make 4K blocks, with the CHIP-8 monitor and a game in each block in the proper locations. So, in this use (where I'm really using only to structure bytes), it becomes a sort of pseudo-assembler. A bin2hex program was used to create fake "DB 0xXX entries of the object CHIP-8 code of various games, which were INCluded. I'm working on a "big" file.bin image of perhaps 60 games that I found on Github.