I've been looking at various open-source RISC-V cores to hook up to the 2D sprite renderer I've been working on, and it looks like Rocket Chip is the way to go, since it's so highly-configurable. That's perfect for me, because game system cores have always been highly custom. Let's see what it takes to build … Continue reading Let’s Build a Rocket Chip →

I've been following Will Green's excellent FPGA VGA Graphics in Verilog series, wherein he creates a VGA output block in Verilog, and displays some sprites on the screen. I wanted to do away with the need for physical hardware, and simulate the VGA generator entirely (I gotta have my end-to-end testing!) using Icarus Verilog. So … Continue reading Capturing frames from a simulated HDL VGA generator →

This is an interesting FPGA project: http://www.electronics-lab.com/ultraminer-fpga-affordable-16-nm-xilinx-fpga-dev-board-crypto-mining/ It's 100% dedicated to mining. No GPIOs (that I can see), no external interfaces other than a (relatively) low-speed USB (probably 2.0) port. I'm not planning on getting into crypto mining, but the board might be an inexpensive interesting to prototype larger hardware designs and then move to … Continue reading Interesting FPGA Project →

When I started this blog, I had this crazy idea that I'd do everything in Microsoft Word, on Windows 10, and publish on WordPress.com. Some people push the limits of that open-source free-software life, I wanted to push the limits of ease-of-use and comfort. I'm calling the experiment a failure, kind of. Microsoft Word is … Continue reading Microsoft Word is not a Great Blogging Platform →

I've been bookmarking interesting articles. Tons of interesting articles. Any by "bookmarking" I mean emailing them to myself while sitting on the train on my way to work. "Ooo that looks interesting" *email to myself* At present, I have about 300 emails in my inbox, from myself. I pretty much delete everything else. I want … Continue reading Things I Plan on Blogging About but Probably Won’t →

I randomly remembered the title of one of the first blogs I read as a kid. (Probably because it mentioned Gameboy Advance programming). I googled the name, and there was exactly one result: An old list of blogs that happened to link to it. The original website is long gone. I had to go to … Continue reading Internet Archive →

[Credit where credit is due] Thanks to John Piliounis (jopil@atlascom.gr) for pointing out a mistake in one of my PCIe diagrams!  First, what's PCI Express?  PCI Express is a standard connector between your motherboard and various PC addons, such as graphics cards and Wi-Fi cards. It's a complex high-performance serial link. It's also very robust … Continue reading A De-Facto PCI Express Standard Emerges →

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_logic People have actually bothered to express things like this in math. I'm impressed. Basically, they broke it down into things like this: "If A and B and C are true, and D and E and F are possible at all then assume G" "Does it have a beak and wings? Do any other things … Continue reading Default Logic →

I just bought a PIC32 Ethernet Starter Kit on eBay. I initially tried to follow this guide to setting up a HTTP server: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyclfQkgLnM  However, I ran into a few issues when I tried to compile the project: The TCP/IP library complained about missing "SHA-256". Easily resolved by adding: MPLAB Harmony Configurator --> MPLAB Harmony … Continue reading Fixing Compile Errors in MPLAB-X Harmony TCP/IP Project →

I recently bought a bunch of FPGA boards on eBay. All out of date stuff: Virtex II Pro, Virtex 4, Virtex 5, etc. I'm really building a collection of boards from Xilinx's history here. The reason they're all Xilinx and not Altera boards is, Xilinx has made license keys for very old versions of their … Continue reading Validation of a CPU Core for FPGA →