Out of curiosity how did the Catalina download counter go in your absence? It's only now I read your post about hitting 10000 downloads. That's quite phenomenal.
You have your work cut out with that PII thing on the horizon.
Out of curiosity how did the Catalina download counter go in your absence? It's only now I read your post about hitting 10000 downloads. That's quite phenomenal.
Good question - I haven't checked it in months! Now up to 12,168. Note that this is for all versions of Catalina ever since 3.1, and I expect there is a lot of people who downloaded each version in turn. A more realistic statistic is to just look at 3.10 - this has 1792 downloads, and is still getting around 10 downloads per day.
As you have probably seen you can get a configuration for FPGA to turn it into a Prop II. Or at least enough parts of a Prop II to exercise some code.
I have the Terasic DE0 Nano board (Thank you Coley) which can support a single Prop II COG and 32k HUB RAM.
Just got it up and running today.
Good thing about this idea is that when one is done exercising PII code ideas and the prop II itself is out one can use the board for other nifty FPGA experiments. For example implementing a ZPU processor (Remember Zog):)
As you have probably seen you can get a configuration for FPGA to turn it into a Prop II. Or at least enough parts of a Prop II to exercise some code.
I have the Terasic DE0 Nano board (Thank you Coley) which can support a single Prop II COG and 32k HUB RAM.
Just got it up and running today.
Good thing about this idea is that when one is done exercising PII code ideas and the prop II itself is out one can use the board for other nifty FPGA experiments. For example implementing a ZPU processor (Remember Zog):)
I've been away from the forums for a while - health issues - so I just wanted to post a note saying I'm ok and I expect to be back again on a regular basis from now on. Thanks to those who inquired and/or sent good wishes.
Welcome back Ross! Glad to have you here again and I'm glad your health issues are behind you!
Just wanted to let everyone know that a new release of Catalina (3.11) will appear shortly. This may well be the last of the 3.x series (Propeller 2 support will appear as 4.0).
The main purpose of this release is to fix up a whole bunch of minor issues I have been dealing with individually with various people (i.e. sending individual patches etc). I decided there are now enough to warrant the overhead of a full release.
Not much new stuff - beside a number of bug fixes there are only a few significant functional changes:
A new SD card plugin to handle SDHC cards (i.e. SD cards > 2Gb). The old one is still supported as well, but only handles SD cards (<= 2Gb).
The default PASM assembler is now openspin (in place of homespun). Openspin is now a complete replacement for homespun, and works with both the Catalina compiler, the Catalina optimizer and the Blackbox/BlackCat debuggers.
The inclusion of the LMM version of the Catalina optimizer. Binaries only at this stage, until I get a chance to tidy up the source - this will make Catalina 100% open source.
Support for inline assembler, via a new PASM keyword. For example:
#include <propeller.h>
void main() {
PASM("or dira, #1"); // set bit 0 as output (DEBUG LED on Hydra)
while(1) {
msleep(500);
PASM("xor outa, #1"); // toggle bit 0 (DEBUG LED on Hydra)
}
}
Yes, I know I said I wouldn't add that last one - but when looking at the complexities of the P2 instruction set, I decided I needed it for my own prototyping.
Support for inline assembler, via a new PASM keyword. Yep, I agree with you, and your original reasons. The P2 playground warrants inline PASM. Chip has added inline "snippets" to SPIN as well. They get blasted in quickly, then executed in COG, essentially passing control of that COG to the user, until the PASM portion completes.
Catalina 3.11 will be released shortly (i.e. as soon as I track down an annoying bug!) and it includes full support for the RamPage2. Have a look at this when this is released for an idea as to what would be required (actually, supporting the Parallax board would be simpler, since it does not appear to use multiple FLASH/SRAM chips for fast parallel access).
Comments
Great you are back. I hope all is well with you.
Out of curiosity how did the Catalina download counter go in your absence? It's only now I read your post about hitting 10000 downloads. That's quite phenomenal.
You have your work cut out with that PII thing on the horizon.
Good question - I haven't checked it in months! Now up to 12,168. Note that this is for all versions of Catalina ever since 3.1, and I expect there is a lot of people who downloaded each version in turn. A more realistic statistic is to just look at 3.10 - this has 1792 downloads, and is still getting around 10 downloads per day.
Yes, I expect I'll have quite a lot of catching up to do
I have the Terasic DE0 Nano board (Thank you Coley) which can support a single Prop II COG and 32k HUB RAM.
Just got it up and running today.
Good thing about this idea is that when one is done exercising PII code ideas and the prop II itself is out one can use the board for other nifty FPGA experiments. For example implementing a ZPU processor (Remember Zog):)
Oh no! Zog has come back to life! Run for the hills!
P.S.
I also have a DE0 Nano. Sadly it has been sitting here unused for quite a while. Time to get down to some serious PII work!
Nice to see You again.
Thanks, Sapieha!
re Wait - I didn't realise it should have been there. I just coded similar to what you showed.
P2 on DE0 is really neat. Lots happening on the P2 forum.
I'm looking forward to getting back to the Propeller!
Ross.
Jim
Just wanted to let everyone know that a new release of Catalina (3.11) will appear shortly. This may well be the last of the 3.x series (Propeller 2 support will appear as 4.0).
The main purpose of this release is to fix up a whole bunch of minor issues I have been dealing with individually with various people (i.e. sending individual patches etc). I decided there are now enough to warrant the overhead of a full release.
Not much new stuff - beside a number of bug fixes there are only a few significant functional changes:
#include <propeller.h> void main() { PASM("or dira, #1"); // set bit 0 as output (DEBUG LED on Hydra) while(1) { msleep(500); PASM("xor outa, #1"); // toggle bit 0 (DEBUG LED on Hydra) } }Yes, I know I said I wouldn't add that last one
I expect version 3.11 to be out in a week or so.
Ross.
Sweet!
<thinks - hmm how about we take the entire z80 emulation written in LMM pasm, and add the text PASM(" in front of each instruction...>
Support for inline assembler, via a new PASM keyword. Yep, I agree with you, and your original reasons. The P2 playground warrants inline PASM. Chip has added inline "snippets" to SPIN as well. They get blasted in quickly, then executed in COG, essentially passing control of that COG to the user, until the PASM portion completes.
I'm having a temporary memory blank - does catalina have a cache driver for the new 23LC1024 8 pin 128k serial sram?
Just thinking about your PASM instruction and large assembly programs bigger than 32k...
I'm not aware of any Propeller boards that use this chip. However, it would be fairly simple to adapt on of the existing SRAM drivers, I would think.
Ross.
http://www.parallax.com/Store/Microcontrollers/BASICStampModules/tabid/134/ProductID/927/List/1/Default.aspx?SortField=UnitCost,ProductName
It's over my head to try to adapt the existing configurations into something that would work for this - but I'd like to learn...
- Earl
Hi Earl,
Yes, not too difficult. The concept (but not the detail, obviously) is quite similar to Rayslogic's RamPage2 (http://www.rayslogic.com/Propeller/Products/FlashPoint/FlashPoint.htm).
Catalina 3.11 will be released shortly (i.e. as soon as I track down an annoying bug!) and it includes full support for the RamPage2. Have a look at this when this is released for an idea as to what would be required (actually, supporting the Parallax board would be simpler, since it does not appear to use multiple FLASH/SRAM chips for fast parallel access).
Ross.
Catalina 3.11 is now available (here).
Ross.