exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

exxos wrote: 07 Sep 2018 19:55

Cyprian wrote: 07 Sep 2018 19:47 how much for such a fpga blitter?

Not sure yet.. The blitters I was selling before were a silly £28 due to high costs in obtaining the things, I don't expect the cost to be more than that.. but could be close.

excellent

exxos wrote: 07 Sep 2018 19:55With such a coded core.. it is of course possible to add functions.. not sure what, that's up to the coders to think up what might be possible/useful..

how much % of core will be free for additional fuctions??

Don't you need JTAG pins too, and a serial eeprom to load the blitter code in the FPGA on boot ?

exxos wrote: 07 Sep 2018 19:55With such a coded core.. it is of course possible to add functions.. not sure what, that's up to the coders to think up what might be possible/useful..

From a games programming point of view and if it is at all possible perhaps the following...

First, the awesome stuff that all great 2D graphics chips were made of:

1. Hardware sprites (or at least HW collision detection)
2. Hardware realtime alpha blending (at least 2 blend types would be great!)
3. Hardware realtime rotation/scaling.

Now some (possibly) easier to accomplish options:

4. TT compatible 8bpp mode (even if its 320x240)
5. 12bpp colour modes
(the above two may need changes to memory mapping/TOS)
6. Chunky mode or at least an onboard (hardware) P2C conversion.

If any of these could be implemented, or at least some sort of hardware assistance towards that, it would be amazing.

Or maybe some sort of task processor (like the Amiga copper) for blit tasks which would free more CPU time.

Is that enough 'thinking up?' ;)

What about a LINEMODE (for drawing lines) like the Amiga blitter?

Well, one thing to bare in mind , is the blitter "isn't" a video generator of any kind.. it doesn't really know anything of resolutions and colours.. its a device to basically shift and edit blocks of data to and from ram quickly... There may not be any other functions which could be added...

https://mikro.naprvyraz.sk/docs/ST_E/BLITTER.TXT

rpineau wrote: 07 Sep 2018 21:23 Don't you need JTAG pins too, and a serial eeprom to load the blitter code in the FPGA on boot ?

ah yep :( Can't find any info on how the eprom is supposed to be wired up :roll: Thats the problem with things being all on a "demo board".. theres like loads of info how to use the thing but nothing on how to make your own :roll:

Is this stil based on the 10M02SCE144I7G ?
If yes then you're ok as the MAX 10 has an internal flash that can be programmed via JTAG :
https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/p ... config.pdf

rpineau wrote: 07 Sep 2018 23:30 Is this stil based on the 10M02SCE144I7G ?

Yes.

Good. so you only need JTAG on there apparently based on the doc I linked in my previous edited post :)

rpineau wrote: 07 Sep 2018 23:32 Good. so you only need JTAG on there apparently based on the doc I linked in my previous edited post :)

I'm confused :( JTAG according to videos & FPGA will lose the program when powered down, which is why the external eeprom is needed.. but for the MAX10, I'm not really seeing anything about it :roll: