exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

PaulJ wrote: ↑Mon Apr 22, 2019 4:11 pm Icky, did you hand solder or bake?

Bake and then clean up with hand solder.

Looks good.

Just to give an update on the FPGA Blitter board (Sparkalaphobia - I did mention we had started naming boards). This thread isn't dead we are working through some issues and directions.

Firstly we had some issues with the footprint libraries in Eagle the worst one being the regulator. The pins were wrong on the footprint and on first power on we had smoke and the regulator blew the buffer chips on the board as well. All was not lost though as Max10 was functional after patching a new regulator in.

Picture of the patches applied for testing the Max10 part of the board. We were able to get the blitter core loaded to the Max10 but due to the buffer chips being dead due to the regulator issue we could not test any further.


It also helped to highlight a few additions we needed to add to help with configuring the board and a new board was made from the modifications. Two of these boards have currently been sent away for assembly to save time due to all these projects on the go . New board below.


Well we didn't stop there we had an idea about using a Max10 dev kit board with a modified buffer board from the Blitter board design so we could easily plug into all the chips (MMU, GLUE & Blitter) to try out just by modifying the firmware / core. This way we would have a solid Max10 board to work with.

We looked at many different boards and some are very expensive. e.g. we found one that fitted the bill i.e. enough IO pins on its header and even had 5V to 3.3v buffers built in. Unfortunately the cost was £300+. We had a look at Intel's own Dev Kit (right one in the picture) which seemed promising was a little large but we soon discovered the headers did not expose enough pins.

Finally we went with the QMTech board (left one in picture) that was small, pretty much the same size as the Blitter board, had enough pins and was cheap £16. We currently have a buffer board based off of the Blitter board being designed that fits on the Max10 kits headers. Once we get this working we hope to be able to plug three of these combinations in to have each MMU, GLUE and Blitter core running on real hardware.

Interesting name again.

Interesting that the right board didnt break out all the pins but does look like it was primarily aimed at the advanced Arduino user.

PhilC wrote: ↑Sat Jul 20, 2019 11:45 am Interesting name again.

Sparkalaphobia - the fear of Glitter

PhilC wrote: ↑Sat Jul 20, 2019 11:45 am Interesting that the right board didnt break out all the pins but does look like it was primarily aimed at the advanced Arduino user.

Yes it was odd especially as the Intel board has the bigger chip compared to the other board. Most of the header pins are either GND or non IO pins on the Max10. Yes it does have an Arduino footprint so you can put the many Arduino shields onto it.

nice finding and price looks interesting

Have finally finished the buffer board to work with the Max10 board. It is designed to work as a GLUE, MMU or BLITTER.

Looking good

I have moved the "Blitter in a ST" to a new topic as its not part of the "re-creating" blitter thread.

https://www.exxosforum.co.uk/forum/viewt ... 041#p24396

Just got these two glittery things made up. These are a newer revision of the original with the regulator fixed from the incorrect eagle footprint and the patches from the first one built into the board.


Will sort out the core pin assignment out and load it into the FPGA probably tonight.