Propeller

Progress for the past few days has been slower than I’d like, but hey, progress is progress right?

Hardware Updates

I’ve finally ironed out the remaining bugs in the hardware interface with the propeller. Previously I had thought things were stable, but when I attempted to read back the frame buffer in my scroll code I would get corrupted data, frequent crashes, and hard lockups. I spent two long nights trying to figure out what was wrong with my code; turns out it was a couple of hardware issue…

Bus Buffer Timing

The first problem was with the propeller’s data bus buffer, a 74LVC245 used for converting the 5V signals from the rest of the system down to 3.3V. When the propeller isn’t being accessed this buffer was being held in a high-Z state by a signal called /PROPBE generated by one of my GALs. I suspect that this signal, which was generated from the output of a second GAL, introduced enough extra lag that the buffer was not shutting off fast enough. Putting that signal back under direct propeller control solved the random crashes and data corruption, but not the lockups.

Clock instability

The second problem was with the /STP signal used for clock stretching. This signal had been giving me problems since day one due to voltage level differences. The obvious solution of using an ACT series part for the flip-flop did NOT work; despite the data sheet claiming the 74ACT74 is TTL-level compatible it would not recognize 3.3V on the /PRE input. So, I had the signal hooked up with a pull-up to 5V and was relying on the propeller to pull it low. As it turns out, this only sort of worked, and it was enough to cause the CPU clock to randomly start and stop at weird times, violating the timing specs and causing random lockups. I finally gave up and just tossed a 74HCT04 inverter in front of that signal, since I had a few on-hand, and voila! No more lockups.

The system is now rock-solid as far as I’ve been able to tell. I’ve had it running for more than 48 hours with zero issues. I may even swap out the crystal and see if I can push it up to 4 MHz; previously this made the system horrendously unstable, but with the /STP issue fixed it may finally work.

Video

With the hardware issues sorted out I was finally able to get a basic console driver working, including scrolling. To celebrate I prettied up the boot screen:

The console code is still in that “hacky but at least it works” state. Some of this is due to the fact that I have been dragging my feet on implementing a real driver architecture in my BIOS. Fixing that is high on my priority list for ROM enhancements.

Another thing the console driver is sorely lacking is a robust set of control codes. I briefly considered implementing VT-100 for compatibility with the old serial console, but VT-100 is pretty complex and way overkill for my needs (and it would require a decimal parser in the console driver…yuck). Instead I’ve decided to go more Apple II-style using control characters. Right now the only thing implemented is Ctrl-A + byte to change the text attribute byte.

Sound

Not much to report here. I would like to code up a boot sound soon, but I have zero experience with the SID. I am hoping to find some code I can borrow for that.

Keyboard

Absolutely no progress here. I did briefly work on hooking up the PS/2 connection directly through the VIA, but abandoned it; I just didn’t want the VIA doing that much polling during interrupts. So, I’m back to my original plan of using an ATmega to handle the user input devices.

SPI

After much internal debate I think I’m going to offload SPI onto the ATmega instead of the propeller. The driving force here is that my current propeller interface just doesn’t really provide for a clean way to implement SPI. The shortage of I/O pins contributed as well.

The new plan is to designate the ATmega as the I/O coprocessor; it will handle SPI in addition to the keyboard, mouse, and game controllers. I have not yet decided HOW to do this, as this means the ATmega<->VIA interface will need to be bidirectional. I do have some ideas though.

Next Steps

This week’s number one priority is to get the ATmega interface up and running. Once that’s done I will implement the keyboard code and then finally be free of the serial console for now.

Time permitting I’d also like to finally start tackling the mess that is the BIOS. In fact I may make another post this week just talking about the BIOS design, as I’m finding that these posts help me think through my issues.

As always thanks for reading! 😉

As I mentioned in my previous post I am using a Parallax Propeller in my COLE-2 SBC project. The propeller is a neat little chip. I won’t go into a whole lot of details about it here, since that is well-covered elsewhere, but the basics are that it’s an 8-core (or “cog”) processor running at 80 MHz, and is very hobbyist-friendly. It’s a bit of an odd duck from a programming point of view, but once you get used to it you can do some amazing things with it. There are literally hundreds of open source modules available implementing all sorts of software-designed peripherals so you can do a lot while writing little to no code of you own, if you so choose.

What initially drew me to the propeller is its ability to generate video signals, both composite (NTSC or PAL) and analog VGA. It’s able to do this thanks to some custom hardware included in each cog that facilitates the generation of the proper timing and the shifting out of pixel data based on that timing. You can do this with as little as one cog, although multiple cogs working together will allow you to get higher resolutions and/or better color depth. The only limitations are that is is limited to 6-bit RRGGBB color, and there is only 32 KB of shared RAM (called “hub RAM”) available for holding your frame buffer and other shared data.

Once you have the propeller integrated into your design, however, you might as well put all eight cogs to use; the only cost incurred is adding the extra driver code and maybe some I/O pins (more on that later). With that in mind I decided to see how much I could pack into that single chip.

The Bus Interface

To start with I need a way to interface the propeller to the rest of the system. Many projects just do this over a serial link; the chip can bit-bang serial at modest bit rates, and I could easily have attached it to the second port of the UART. But serial can be a real bottleneck for graphics modes, so I wanted some sort of parallel interface. In an ideal world I would let the chip pretend to be a 32 KB RAM chip, but this would eat up every single available I/O pin and would probably be overkill for the modest graphics modes the chip is capable of producing. So, I decided to borrow from the 1970s-era TMS9918, which did all configuration and VRAM access through just two addressable registers. This means I only need 1 address input instead of 15.

To implement this I connected the propeller to 14 signals bus: D0-D7, Φ2, /IOSEL2 (from my address decoder GAL), RWB, RDY, and /IRQ. The RDY line would be held low to halt the CPU while the propeller responds to a bus request, since it’s not fast enough to keep up with the CPU at full speed. All of these signals would be fed through a pair of 74LVC245 buffers, because the propeller is a 3.3V part but the rest of my system is 5V. So far so good, or so I thought…

RDY and Waiting

As it turns out using RDY with the 65816 is not quite as straightforward as I had hoped, due to the way it multiplexes the bank address onto the data bus. The bank address is emitted during the first half of the CPU cycle, when Φ2 is low. The data bus is connected to a 74ACT573 latch, which is kept open (transparent) during Φ2 low, but which closes and captures the bank address when Φ2 goes high.

Normally this setup works fine, and in fact it’s the exact design recommended by WDC. The problem comes in when you start trying to use RDY. When RDY is pulled low, the CPU halts as soon as Φ2 transitions from high to low. The actual Φ2 clock, however, does not stop. If RDY is kept low long enough for Φ2 to go high again, the bank address latch will capture some random data bus data as the bank address, and when the CPU finally resumes it will likely access the wrong memory address.

For my test implementation I solved this by using some extra lines on a GAL to construct a latch enable signal that such that the latch remains closed as long as RDY is low. Unfortunately this seems to have made the system slightly unstable, even when the propeller is not being accessed (during which times it’s not even on the bus, as its data bus buffer is disabled until /IOSEL2 goes low while Φ2 is high.) My GALs are fast (7 ns parts), but it’s possible the extra delay is the causing the strange behavior.

For my next attempt I am going to try a different approach: halting the CPU’s Φ2 clock during the high phase using a circuit like this:

My current clock generator is the top half of that circuit, which means I already have the second half of the flip-flop available to use to add the bottom half; I just need to do the wiring. Once that’s done the propeller will pull /STP low instead of RDY, and my bank address latch will go back to being directly qualified by Φ2. I am hoping this will result in a stable system.

As a bonus I am hoping this new setup will solve another issue I have so far ignored; when first powering on, the propeller takes a few seconds to boot, during which it is not properly asserting RDY. This causes boots to randomly fail. With the new setup /STP will be low during this time so the CPU will not even try to boot until the propeller is up and running.

The Software

Writing the PASM code to implement the 65xx bus interface turned out to be much easier than I was expecting; I was able to hack out a working proof-of-concept implementation in a few hours. It isn’t even a lot of code; the basic code forming the main loop is just this:

mainloop    waitpeq Pin_PHI2, Pin_CS_PHI2       'Wait for /CS to go low with PHI2 high
            andn    outa, Pin_RDY               'Pull RDY low
            mov     _in, ina                    'Capture the input port
            and     _in, Pin_RS WZ,NR           'Check RS bit (0 = vram, 1 = registers)
            and     _in, Pin_RWB                'Mask RWB bit for later
    if_e    jmp     #:vram
            tjz     _in, #write_register
            jmp     #read_register
:vram       tjz     _in, #write_vram
            jmp     #read_vram

'' Common code for all ops; unhalts the CPU, waits for /CS to go high and then loops

finish_request
            or      outa, Pin_RDY               'Unpause the CPU
            waitpeq Pin_CS, Pin_CS              'Wait for /CS to go high again
            andn    dira, Pins_Data             'Set data bus pins to high-Z (input state)
            jmp     #mainloop                   'Rinse and repeat

In the end I had a working setup in which reading the propeller on either I/O port would return a constantly incrementing byte, which I could also change by writing to either port. This allowed me to verify that the bus interface was working properly.

With the test code working I’ve started adding useful functionality. So far I’ve gotten the VRAM read and write working, and I’ve been able to successfully fill the screen with characters using assembly code running on the main CPU.

Video

At the moment the video output is being driven by the “80×25 C0DF” driver from the waitvid.2048 repository. It generates 80×25 text using a 9×16 font; each character has an attribute byte associated with it that points to a 256-entry color palette. Each color entry in turn consists of a foreground/background color pair and a blink bit. The driver also supports two independent hardware cursors that can be a block or an underline, with or without blinking. The video buffer, color palette, and the font are all in hub RAM, so in theory they could all be made changeable by the main CPU.

I would like to offer the ability to switch to an alternate video driver (either a limited resolution bitmap, or perhaps a tiled driver with sprites), but as of yet I have not worked out how to accomplish this.

Sound

Since I have video the most natural choice for another thing to add is audio. As it turns out someone has written a Propeller module called SIDcog that emulates the C64 SID chip. It takes only a single cog to run, uses very little hub RAM (just a couple dozen bytes for registers) and only two I/O pins.

The SIDcog module is very simple to use; you tell it what pins to use for left/right audio, and it returns a pointer to a block of emulated SID registers in hub memory. Reading or writing those locations will affect the emulated SID just like it would a real one. So, in theory, once I’ve finished implementing the write_register function in my bus interface I will be able to play sound.

SPI

An SPI cog is the last piece I plan to add, since at that point I will be almost out of I/O pins. The propeller will handle the actual SPI transfers and signal the main CPU via interrupt once the transfer is complete. To allow reading or writing of entire SDcard blocks I plan to implement a small 512-byte buffer. I am not yet sure how this will be implemented at the bus interface side but I have some ideas.

Future Work

At the moment I’m hard at work getting the bus interface fully implemented. My focus is on getting the video registers implemented enough that I can try redirecting the console output to VGA. Expect another post (with pictures) once that VGA boot screen is working!

NOTE: I’m going to experiment with turning on commenting, starting with this post. We’ll see how it goes.

The nice thing about creating things as a hobby is that you can switch to a new thing whenever you get bored or frustrated with the current thing. That is exactly what happened to me a few months ago: I started getting frustrated with the limited features I had available on COLE-1, so I decided to just jump ahead and start the next iteration. The result is this:

That ugly mess of wires is actually a functional 2 MHz 65816-based SBC, called, not surprisingly, COLE-2.

Hardware Overview

COLE-2 will be a substantial upgrade from its predecessor:

• 6 MHz 65C816 CPU (largely limited by EEPROM speeds)
• 1 MB of RAM
• 256 KB of ROM w/ full system monitor, OS, and 16-bit BASIC
• Glue logic moved to two 22V10 GALs
• 28L92 Dual UART providing two DB-9 serial ports
• 80 MHz Parallax Propeller for analog VGA video, stereo audio, and SPI
• ATmega328p for PS/2 keyboard/mouse and two NES-compatible game ports
  
• Dual 65C22 Versatile Interface Adapters
• SD card reader
• A user port
• A single expansion slot

When I started this project my goal was to produce another headless SBC similar to COLE-1, but with an expansion slot that would act as a platform for developing my custom CPLD-based video system. However it became apparent that I was trying to take too big of a leap there, and so I decided to add basic on-board video as an interim step.

My current prototype is scaled down from the final specs, since it’s implemented on solderless breadboards. It only runs at 2 MHz, and has only 512 KB of RAM, 32 KB of ROM, one VIA, and no ATmega. Much of this is just due to lack of space on the breadboard; as you can see I’m already spilling out onto additional boards, and all those long wire runs take their toll on stability, especially at higher speeds. My plan is to squeeze the ATmega in there somewhere to get a working keyboard port, and then move on to designing the PCB and building a full prototype.

In my next post I will dive into how I integrated the Propeller into my design.