Sunday 23 June 2019

Starting to bring the MEGA65 R2 PCBs up

FINALLY I have arrived in Germany with the MEGA65 crew, so that we can start bringing the MEGA65 R2 PCBs to life.



Here is the board in its case, together with the JTAG programmer, which we need to plug in to be able to program the FPGA:


The problem was when we first plugged the JTAG adapter in, it didn't have any happy lights. But a quick message to Antti confirmed that we needed to set the dip-switches correctly, as shown below.  Then it powered up fine, as we can see below:


Then at this point, we were in a position to try the bitstream that we had previously prepared.  This bitstream won't make everything work, but has the parts that are common with the first revision, primarily the VGA output, sound output and joystick inputs.  And, joy of joys, it worked, with a nice display:



It is showing our open-source C64 ROMs, because that is now included in the bitstream as the default boot mechanism if there are no SD cards inserted.

The reset button has also been corrected in the R2 board, so that it resets the CPU instead of causing the FPGA to reflash.

Ok. So that's the first step of livening done.  Now to try to get the joysticks and souund working...

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