MiST - FPGA ST

[MasterOfGizmo]

Hi,

see my little Atari-FPGA project here:
http://harbaum.org/till/mist

Currently TOS 1.00, TOS 1.04 and EmuTOS boot, TOS 2.06 throws an exception as there's no floppy implemented yet.

Video booting TOS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnB5dKg07OQ

Have fun!

[Dal]

Very nice! Will you be producing any runs of this or are you relying on someone (perhaps Lotherek) picking it up?

[MasterOfGizmo]

Very nice! Will you be producing any runs of this or are you relying on someone (perhaps Lotherek) picking it up?

I have built a total of eight boards by now. I am looking what the options are and i have contacted Lotharek some weeks ago.

However, i have five spare empty PCBs i'd be willing to share immediately.

[DarkLord]

Pretty cool stuff! Will be looking forward to an end product for sale.

[wongck]

Wow...another project.
Great to see it.

[MasterOfGizmo]

Video booting EmuTOS:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIK9Oy9CJjM

[calimero]

WOW! you made whole project in just four months?
is it 100% compatibility with original ST? (all games works?)

btw why Suska board is so expensive...?

[MasterOfGizmo]

WOW! you made whole project in just four months?
is it 100% compatibility with original ST? (all games works?)

No, currently not even color video works.

btw why Suska board is so expensive...?

Because of the parts it consists of and the time spent to build the device?

[alexh]

Nice work. Looks good.

It looks like a hardware project (PCB only)?

By that I mean did you didn't develop your own Atari ST core? You used the open-source one called Suska core developed by Wolfgang?

Still very cool work. A lot of NRE and it is no mean feat to create a BSP (board support package) to map/convert a core like Suska's I/O to the capabilities of your PCB. Porting cores to the MiniMig v1.1 PCB (excluding file I/O) could take days of playing around to shoe-horn it in.

The media interfaces were always the hardest. Fortunately a lot of smart guys have done a lot of work in this area and opened up their source. (Yaqube especially)

So have you managed to get the Spectrum, MSX, Megadrive and Atari cores on your board?

[MasterOfGizmo]

It looks like a hardware project (PCB only)?

By that I mean did you didn't develop your own Atari ST core? You used the open-source one called Suska core developed by Wolfgang?

it's not Wolfgangs core. It's a new one (much simpler than Wolfgangs) which i wrote from scratch based upon parts i took from the Minimig.

[MasterOfGizmo]

In the meantime a bunch of games are running. Examples:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2aEECZ-rUE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfVEx-mmtxo

[wongck]

Looks like it's making great headway with it.

[CiH]

In the meantime a bunch of games are running. Examples:

Interesting and impressive.

The Oxyd game is nice. Xenon 2 has sluggish sample playback and very fast chip music. Out of interest, for Frontier, how fast is the emulated 68000 running, as the frame rate seems to be reasonable for that game

[rian_ata]

In one of MasterOfGizmo's earlier Youtube videos he mentioned in the description "The current core is clocked at 8MHz like a real ST and runs ca 15% faster than a real one. TOS 2.06 supports up to 14MB of ST RAM." You can have a look at the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTA8JP6hJ-U (running GemBench for example)

[wongck]

Wonder if it can go faster... like having a switchable super-turbo mode for apps.

[MasterOfGizmo]

Wonder if it can go faster... like having a switchable super-turbo mode for apps.

The Amiga/Minimig folks have accelerated the very same setup to ca twice the speed of an Amiga 3000. So yes, there's much room for improvement. But for now i'd like to stay as st compatible as possible. The CPU is explicitely slowed down to the speed of an 8mhz st.

The color video mode currently runs at 72hz. This may very well affect the xenon audio output.

This is an early version. Things will sure improve ....

Edit: The Atari core now supports 50Hz and 60Hz video modes as well as a 56Hz mode for those VGA displays that don't support 50Hz. Many games incl. Xenon II now play their tunes at the correct speed.

[Jungsi]

Are you working on this prjoect with Lotharek? I've seen the "MIST" listed on his site
Is there a date planned to sell this nice piece of hardware?

[MasterOfGizmo]

Are you working on this prjoect with Lotharek? I've seen the "MIST" listed on his site
Is there a date planned to sell this nice piece of hardware?

That's the plan. But i don't know any date.

Anyway, in the meantime most games are running.

[AnakiMana]

I just saw this posted on Lotharek's site under the MIST page:

- 04.04.2013 - Final ( i hope) pcbs are ready for automatic assembly - first TEST RUN

[AnakiMana]

Hey MasterOfGizmo, this may be slightly off topic, but if you're able to do this (MiST), is it possible you might bring a TT030 or Falcon clone to the table some day? They're so expensive - if you can even find one for sale... I don't know if I'd ever be able to experience those environments otherwise. MiTT? MiF?

[Nikolas]

Before mass production i will like dvi or hdmi, probably thats best way.

[waSTE]

Before mass production i will like dvi or hdmi, probably thats best way.

Ohh I don't mind as much, I just want to buy one now (Assuming they are cheaper than Minimig as hoped by Lotharek!)

[MasterOfGizmo]

Before mass production i will like dvi or hdmi, probably thats best way.

Hopefully the first MIST will not be the last one. So instead of adding new features etc i prefer to get this one our of the door asap. But hdmi definitely is an option.

The Minimig really brought new life to the Amiga scene. Maybe the MIST will be cheap enough to do the same for the Atari ST. And of course the MIST is also Amiga compatible, so you get two machines in one.

The thing i currently enjoy most is its size. You can put it in your pocket together with its tiny power supply, take it with you to a friend and play Oxyd.

[wietze]

Out of curiosity, what kind of price range are we looking at here?

[alexh]

And of course the MIST is also Amiga compatible, so you get two machines in one.

Two? MIST will undoutably take all the open source FPGA re-creations of classic computers.

C64, Amstrad, Sinclair Spectrum, Megadrive, NES, Colecovision, Vic20, Astrocade, countless FPGA Arcade games.

The hard work will be in making a clean BSP (board support package) so that core developers can port their core to the board and be able to use all the I/O easily including the SD card. (Which is where MiniMig v1.1 falls over because the ARM/PIC firmware wasn't in a great shape).

I look forward to it.