Planning for stability, and the case for re-working the CPU

One of the things that we are determined to do with the MEGA65, is to have the core functions of the machine ready and stable from the outset.

In particular, we want people to be able to have dependable cycle timing for the CPU and VIC-IV, so far as is possible, so that people can safely write games and demos for it, without worrying about future updates breaking things.

The problem at the moment is that our existing 48MHz CPU doesn't meet timing closure, i.e., it is too fast for what the FPGA can guarantee will work, and it's also much too big: It takes up somewhere between 15% - 30% of the very large FPGA we are using.  This is a Bad Thing. Especially since we don't yet have a CPU core for an emulated floppy drive, and we would really like to be able to emulate two floppy drives at the same time, so we would need 3 CPUs.  Of course the floppy drive CPUs can be 6502s instead of 4502s, which simplifies things a bit, but it was still running the risk of being much too big.

Also, the current CPU has a couple of weird bugs that are proving hard to track down, because the existing CPU has been built by accretion, as I have realised things that need to be in it.

So, while on the one hand, it feels like we are going backwards in the short-term, I have started implementing an all new CPU, that will be much smaller, will meet timing closure, and will generally be simpler and easier to understand, and therefore to debug.

This will in fact be the 3rd or 4th CPU design for the MEGA65, depending on how you count things, and will also incorporate what I have learnt through that process, and also some other modern CPU features that I have been reading up on.  The net result is that the new CPU should be quite a lot faster than the current design, but you will have to wait for future blog posts to find out how fast, because even I don't yet know how fast it will end up being.

So expect a few blog posts over the coming days and weeks as I go through the design of the CPU, and document the process of getting it to work.