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Propeller II: Emulation of the P2 on FPGA boards (Prop123-A7/A9, DE0-NANO, DE2-115, etc) - Page 19 — Parallax Forums

Propeller II: Emulation of the P2 on FPGA boards (Prop123-A7/A9, DE0-NANO, DE2-115, etc)

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  • AribaAriba Posts: 2,690
    edited 2013-03-30 10:40
    David Betz wrote: »
    Unfortunately, I don't think real P2 chips will be available at OPC so feel free to jump on the FPGA emulation bandwagon! We'll welcome you aboard!
    What does "OPC" mean?

    Ordinary Propeller Crowd ?
    Overseas Propeller community?

    Andy
  • David BetzDavid Betz Posts: 14,516
    edited 2013-03-30 10:44
    Ariba wrote: »
    What does "OPC" mean?

    Ordinary Propeller Crowd ?
    Overseas Propeller community?

    Andy

    Official Propeller Conference on May 4th in Rocklin.
  • fpalmansfpalmans Posts: 10
    edited 2013-04-01 11:47
    David Betz wrote: »
    Unfortunately, I don't think real P2 chips will be available at OPC so feel free to jump on the FPGA emulation bandwagon! We'll welcome you aboard!

    Thank you, David. I'll order the DE0-NANO to get started and if all works out, I'll move up to the DE2-115.

    Cheers,
    Frank.
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2013-05-10 13:04
    Thanks to the amazing generosity of Coley I now have in my possession a DE0 nano board and a Parallax adapter for it. I have to say that adapter is a beautifully made piece of kit.
    So far I have had a lot of fun checking out the Quartus tools and the Terasic demo configurations. All seems to work very well.
    So on to business. I think I can find the latest Prop II configuration for this thing but then what?
    You see I live in a Windows free world so the pnut.exe is not much help here. So what do I need to get going from a Linux host?
  • David BetzDavid Betz Posts: 14,516
    edited 2013-05-10 13:28
    Heater. wrote: »
    Thanks to the amazing generosity of Coley I now have in my possession a DE0 nano board and a Parallax adapter for it. I have to say that adapter is a beautifully made piece of kit.
    So far I have had a lot of fun checking out the Quartus tools and the Terasic demo configurations. All seems to work very well.
    So on to business. I think I can find the latest Prop II configuration for this thing but then what?
    You see I live in a Windows free world so the pnut.exe is not much help here. So what do I need to get going from a Linux host?
    Welcome to the P2 emulation world! You can use PropGCC from a Linux environment. Just download and build the p2test branch from Google Code.
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2013-05-10 13:38
    Thanks David. Perhaps that's all I need to know to kick off. I'll be back after some propgcc building....
  • David BetzDavid Betz Posts: 14,516
    edited 2013-05-10 13:42
    Heater. wrote: »
    Thanks David. Perhaps that's all I need to know to kick off. I'll be back after some propgcc building....
    You of course are severely constrained on the DE0-Nano because it only supports one COG and 32k of hub memory but you can use GAS to write assembly code. You can also write C code but I imagine you want to play with the new P2 instructions.
  • pedwardpedward Posts: 1,642
    edited 2013-05-10 13:45
    Use wine to run pnut, that's what I did. Bill posted some info on it.
  • David BetzDavid Betz Posts: 14,516
    edited 2013-05-10 14:05
    pedward wrote: »
    Use wine to run pnut, that's what I did. Bill posted some info on it.
    I'm sure that would work too. I run PNut on my Mac under Parallels when necessary. Even the Altera programming tools seem to run okay under Parallels.
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2013-05-10 14:14
    @David,

    "...only supports one COG..."

    Good. You remember that "in COG full duplex serial demo in C" using "heater threads"? Well, I'm the guy who suggested to Chip that he could make his TASKSWICH system alternate between threads automatically. Amazingly Chip managed to squeeze that in at the final hour. I never imagined it was possible.

    I'm dying to try it out. If it works as as advertised then one cog is as good as four to me:)

    So what I'm after is in COG C code. Perhaps with some inline PASM to handle the task set up.

    @pedward,

    Yes, I thought about wine. Thing is, I have been living in a Windows free world since 1997 and now Parallax has caught up with the open source idea and put a lot of effort into it. So I don't feel in the mood for retrograding.
  • pedwardpedward Posts: 1,642
    edited 2013-05-10 16:00
    Wine is open source software, completely independent of MS, so you can feel happy that your ideals remain intact. I look at Wine as simply a binary interface layer. I have it setup so PE binaries are natively runnable by registering them with a kernel module.

    As much zeal I've had for Linux, I have been unable to escape the reality of Windows and now run a virtual machine in VMWare. It makes Windows tolerable from a management/reboot standpoint, but it's still too damn slow.
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2013-05-10 21:15
    pedward,

    Yes wine is open source. Sometimes I think one of the best ways to write cross-platform gui apps is to restrict your self to whatever parts of the win32 api work under libwine:)

    Perhaps I'll give pnut a go, at least initially so I know everything is working OK.
  • pedwardpedward Posts: 1,642
    edited 2013-05-10 21:35
    Heater. wrote: »
    pedward,

    Yes wine is open source. Sometimes I think one of the best ways to write cross-platform gui apps is to restrict your self to whatever parts of the win32 api work under libwine:)

    Perhaps I'll give pnut a go, at least initially so I know everything is working OK.

    Nah, Qt is a nice substitute, don't defile yourself with Windows API code...
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2013-05-11 13:05
    It lives !

    I just managed to get as far as "Propeller II Monitor" turning up in my SimpleIDE terminal! Ecstatic!

    OK that was with the .jic file from last December.

    Prooblem is when I use the .jic file from April. supposedly with SDAM support, I don't get anything out of the monitor. Only LED0 lights up.

    I tried reloading the .jic a few times and fetched it from the forum twice just to be sure it was OK. No go.

    Here are the md5sums of my files if its worth checking:

    1dea9db63c3132ec14743279496a0de8 DE0_Nano_Prop2_2013_10_4.jic
    7bc1d7d11fc3a08db86e716a28e73ae0 DE0_Nano_Prop2.jic

    I had to go back to the older one to get any life.

    Any ideas?
  • David BetzDavid Betz Posts: 14,516
    edited 2013-05-11 13:19
    Heater. wrote: »
    It lives !

    I just managed to get as far as "Propeller II Monitor" turning up in my SimpleIDE terminal! Ecstatic!

    OK that was with the .jic file from last December.

    Prooblem is when I use the .jic file from April. supposedly with SDAM support, I don't get anything out of the monitor. Only LED0 lights up.

    I tried reloading the .jic a few times and fetched it from the forum twice just to be sure it was OK. No go.

    Here are the md5sums of my files if its worth checking:

    1dea9db63c3132ec14743279496a0de8 DE0_Nano_Prop2_2013_10_4.jic
    7bc1d7d11fc3a08db86e716a28e73ae0 DE0_Nano_Prop2.jic

    I had to go back to the older one to get any life.

    Any ideas?
    Did you remember to move your PropPlug over to the add-on board after loading the new FPGA configuration?
  • cgraceycgracey Posts: 14,155
    edited 2013-05-11 13:22
    David Betz wrote: »
    Did you remember to move your PropPlug over to the add-on board after loading the new FPGA configuration?

    Good thinking, David! I couldn't think of what the problem might be. I hope you're right.
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2013-05-11 13:25
    No. No body told me to:)

    Why do I need to and which way round does the Prop Plug go on the expander?
  • David BetzDavid Betz Posts: 14,516
    edited 2013-05-11 13:43
    Heater. wrote: »
    No. No body told me to:)

    Why do I need to and which way round does the Prop Plug go on the expander?
    I don't know which way it goes but I remember asking the same question myself. The important part of the answer was that it doesn't hurt to plug it in backwards. Just try it one way and if it doesn't work reverse it.
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2013-05-11 14:01
    Yay, it works!

    I was a bit nervous about plugging it backwards. Just now I'm tired enough I could get blue smoke out of a rock.

    So what's all this about? Why does using the SDRAM need the adapter card? Apart from the SDRAM is the original config good for everything?

    I have not found any descrption of this yet.
  • David BetzDavid Betz Posts: 14,516
    edited 2013-05-11 14:10
    Heater. wrote: »
    Yay, it works!

    I was a bit nervous about plugging it backwards. Just now I'm tired enough I could get blue smoke out of a rock.

    So what's all this about? Why does using the SDRAM need the adapter card? Apart from the SDRAM is the original config good for everything?

    I have not found any descrption of this yet.
    I don't think the SDRAM needs the adapter. I think that's for the VGA and CVBS output. There may not be a configuration that supports SDRAM without the adapter board though.
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2013-05-11 22:04
    Sadly I have no luck running PNut.exe under wine on Debian.

    Well it runs and it claims to have found hardware version 32 on COM5.
    It also downloads the example program to RAM without error.

    Trouble is it is unusable as an editor as the cursor is all over the place. It does not follow the current insertion point.

    Anyone else seen this? Any ideas?

    Else it's on to propgcc somehow.

    I was just reading through the monitor code. It's dead neat.
  • pedwardpedward Posts: 1,642
    edited 2013-05-11 23:59
    You are missing some required fonts, install all of the Wine fonts. I seem to recall that there may be a third party script that will install and fix the fonts. I recall having to do this to get the editor to work right.
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2013-05-12 00:24
    Oh yeah! Now it works.
    It was a simple:
    apt-get install msttcorefonts
    
    away.

    Somehow I missed that package when searching around for wine things.

    Thanks Pedward.
  • David BetzDavid Betz Posts: 14,516
    edited 2013-05-12 05:06
    Heater. wrote: »
    Sadly I have no luck running PNut.exe under wine on Debian.

    Well it runs and it claims to have found hardware version 32 on COM5.
    It also downloads the example program to RAM without error.

    Trouble is it is unusable as an editor as the cursor is all over the place. It does not follow the current insertion point.

    Anyone else seen this? Any ideas?

    Else it's on to propgcc somehow.

    I was just reading through the monitor code. It's dead neat.
    The last time I checked PNut was incapable of loading even moderately sized programs. You can still make good use of propgcc even if you have PNut working. Check the WireWorld thread for an example of how to use it to load data (images) from SD card and start PNut-built drivers. You can, of course, also build drivers using gas.
  • bartgranthambartgrantham Posts: 83
    edited 2013-07-16 10:12
    Add one more to the ranks of successful running of Prop2 on the DE0-Nano. Fired up the monitor and got a huge grin on my face as I remembered the old Apple ][ monitor.

    I don't have an add-on board but I'd like to use the revised .jic with the 32M memory support, can someone tell me what pins serial are brought to on the add-on board so that I can move my PropPlug to the right place?
  • SapiehaSapieha Posts: 2,964
    edited 2013-07-16 11:02
    Hi bartgrantham.

    Download latest ZIP file with updates -- In it You will find SCH - description on pins used


    Add one more to the ranks of successful running of Prop2 on the DE0-Nano. Fired up the monitor and got a huge grin on my face as I remembered the old Apple ][ monitor.

    I don't have an add-on board but I'd like to use the revised .jic with the 32M memory support, can someone tell me what pins serial are brought to on the add-on board so that I can move my PropPlug to the right place?
  • AribaAriba Posts: 2,690
    edited 2013-07-16 16:37
    Add one more to the ranks of successful running of Prop2 on the DE0-Nano. Fired up the monitor and got a huge grin on my face as I remembered the old Apple ][ monitor.

    I don't have an add-on board but I'd like to use the revised .jic with the 32M memory support, can someone tell me what pins serial are brought to on the add-on board so that I can move my PropPlug to the right place?

    Here are the pins for the PropPlug:
    Nano_Ser.gif


    This is seen from the Backside (where the SDRAM is).
    The RX, Tx are seen from the Prop2, so RX=IO91, TX=IO90.

    Andy
    350 x 250 - 3K
  • Cluso99Cluso99 Posts: 18,069
    edited 2013-07-17 16:13
    Nice to see another P2 enthusiast aboard!
  • Jim FouchJim Fouch Posts: 395
    edited 2013-07-30 14:20
    I'm wondering if someone on here with the DE2-115 board would be willing to measure the size & position of the holes. I'm looking to make a protective back board like the one I have listed on eBay.

    DSCN0868.JPG


    I was able to locate the drawing for the DE2 from the manufacturer, but they do not have the same drawing listed for the DE2-115. I know the 115 is 1/4" wider, but I'm not sure if the feet are just 1/4" further apart.

    The Altrea site lists the DE2-115 as 8-1/4" x 6" and the DE2 as 8"x6". I don't have access to either board. I have requested this information from them, but they have not responded yet.

    I'd be willing to ship (USA 48 lower states only) one free protective board to the first one to respond with the exact dimensions with hole size and positions. :-)

    Thanks
    915 x 252 - 92K
  • TubularTubular Posts: 4,702
    edited 2013-07-30 19:55
    Jim, its more like 8.3" length than 8.25", and that's just the PCB (some connectors overhang slightly). The width is 6". The 4 corner posts are .15" in from each corner , so on a 8" x 5.7" rectangle. The 4 corner posts (tapped spacers) are 10mm long brass and accept M3 screws (not sure of the tapped depth but M3x6 screws would probably be best).

    Be aware there are also 2 "internal" posts also used to secure the top protective acrylic. Just mounting using the 4 corners is enough and that's what we've done to a 3mm stainless "protector"

    No need to ship anything to me, and ask away if you need anything else
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