Current hardware

The hardware in use for the moment is not the perfect setup that I dreamed about. I really would like to have a couple of joystick inputs, a ps/2 keyboard interface and some kind of a speaker output. To be honest I already have this stuff, but I have been coding and for the moment I actually don't need it.

What I have so far is the Terasic DE10-Lite which I already mentioned beforeand that board have a lot of stuff I don't need. If I would select something else I would have a Papilio DUO, add a megashield to that and you have (almost) all interfaces that you need. For a C64 there are obviously a cartridge expansion, floppy and tape interface, user port etc which could be a problem to fit in to that, but in my fpga port I have similar problems. Since I'm not very good at hardware I will have to prepare myself before adding more functionality so I don't break anything.

In the FPGA board I implemented a UART and also a UART parser to handle some basic debug commands - read/write memory etc, but the main thing at the moment is to handle the keyboard. The FPGA UART is connected to an Arduino Mega for one simple reason: I'm not keen on windows programming. I mean, the FPGA could aswell be connected directly to my PC and I could make a simple program to send commands from there, and this is actually on the TODO-list. But instead I have this Arduino connected between the PC and the FPGA. In the PC I use TeraTerm to send commands to the FPGA.

The UART and UART parser are used by a debug interface in the FPGA which is alive all clock cycles the core and vic modules are sleeping, se picture.