harhar, there's a XNOR command, Sounds piggy ^___^

@Erik

Actually I know quite well VHDL, but I never used fpgas, I am rather used to cadence/synopsys tools for asics.
When I read the vhdl I seems quite 'piggy' since some part of it are a longs 'if then else' and almost no
processes are used ...
But i would have to read it twice .
There is already some top unit named 'kuni' and other one .
For instance I wonder if quartus can be used to simulate and trace waveforms or is it just a synthesis tool ?

I just compiled the VDP form ESE it takes ~2700 LEs and frequency is quite high, close to 100MHz ...

@Leo: My mistake, I just assumed that anyone who uses VHDL uses FPGA's as well...

The VDP you have downloaded, does that one already include the command engine? The VDP I have seen a long time ago, was more a V9918 than a V9938, and that design did not share the RAM with the CPU.

There is some kind of 'Simulator' in Quartus, in which you can toggle lines let a bus count, but that is about it. On the Altera site there is a ModelSim-Altera to download, but I think it is not for free.
I use Xilinx WebPack at home, and that one includes a limited version of ModelSim.
So, if you need a good simulator in which you can write test-benches, you could install Xilinx WebPack.

Talking about simulation: I did do something horrible some years ago... We took over some design written in verilog, which ofcourse contained 'some' bugs. I was able to fix the bugs, but our simulators had either licence problems or they just produced errors while parsing the files. So I made a test-bench which could be synthesized and used the crappy Altera-MaxPlusII simulator to see if all worked out fine. It did work but at the end we decided to completely redesign this part in VHDL. Both the verilog part and the vhdl part ended up in some early Philips DVD recorders with DV input. Not bad for my first verilog and vhdl job ;-) (although I shifted to embedded software after that due to lack of new HW projects)

http://gigamix.cocolog-nifty.com/blog/2005/08/1msx_2a5a.html

Ascii Solutions has decided to not commercialize the One Chip MSX.

The future of the OCM lies now in the hands of the MSX-Association that should soon announce the plans to commercialize itself the OCM.

in the end, Nishi will marry a harem, have thousands of kids, and donates a 1cm to them all

Thanks for spotting, mars2000you.

I like to spread infos

As I visit now each day Gigamix, I have generally the infos faster.

@erikmaas

I beleive the VDP is a V9938 , since in the japanese site they put snaphosts of space manbow
and the code seems to include some FSM with a case dispatch for each command , it seems
surprisingly not really big ... maybe it is just an attempt.
In the MSXESE database all the rtl seems wriiten for a system with an external Z80 , so that
is why the Z80 is not present in the top of this design ( although the component is declared ...)

@Leo

I don't think, that Space Manbow uses V9938 command engine.

I mean command engine is used to do graphical copy commands like HMMM...
u mean more sophisticated commands like pset/line/box fill/cpu to vdp copies ?

I don't think Space Manbow uses even HMMM etc. The game it self is working on SCREEN 4 and HMMM type of commands works only in SCREEN 5-8 in V9938. In V9958 there is a possibility to use HMMM in SCREEN 4 though.

I found this link
http://shop.trenz-electronic.de/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=1_27&products_id=49

An fpga board specially designed for doing "retro compting" like commodores ...

"pushed by numerous projects around the web"

I doubt this - can you show me those "numerous projects" ?

I don't know what's the most popular FPGA develpment board; but right now the C-One is a pretty good one :

c64upgra.de/c-one/

It supports mainly C-64 & CPC families.

...but is VERY expensive, 269€!