electronics – Stupid Tech Misadventures

Day 5: HDMI and VGA

So today I decided to start working on getting some video out of my board. My DE-10 Nano comes with an HDMI port and a video encoder chip built right into it, so that makes a pretty obvious choice of video output. My first order of business was just to see if I could getContinue reading “Day 5: HDMI and VGA”

Day 4: The memory bus and a running CPU program

So last time I got a Motorola 68K up and running, cycling through its entire address space and attempting to execute a dummy instruction. However, in order to get the CPU running an actual program, I need to hook up an actual bus to it. I ended up having to do a hell of aContinue reading “Day 4: The memory bus and a running CPU program”

Day 3: Free-running a Motorola 68K

So today I set about getting a Motorola 68K up and running on my FPGA board. My goal was relatively simple: just get an M68K working, fed dummy 0 values on its data pins and tying the top two bits of its output address pins to a pair of LEDs. As the M68K runs, itContinue reading “Day 3: Free-running a Motorola 68K”

Day 2: FPGA time!

So today my FPGA board arrived! I’m excited because this means I finally get to start experimenting with actually designing all of the Athena’s modules for real now and seeing them in action. Of course, the very first thing I wanted to do was just figure out how to program the thing and make someContinue reading “Day 2: FPGA time!”

Introducing Athena: My FPGA retro game console project

Normally, I’m a software engineer. In particular, I specialize in architecting netcode for games. A few weeks ago, I departed a job doing just that at Super Bit Machine – the game I worked on for two years was successfully launched and I’m quite proud of the work I did on it. That said, havingContinue reading “Introducing Athena: My FPGA retro game console project”