Roadmap and status of Gigatron TTL

[veekoo]

I would rather see Raspberry Pi taking over some functions to gain in processing power, graphics and sound.

[lb3361]

You mean the AVR chip in the Pluggy?

The technical problem is that the interface between then is very slow: max 30kb/s downloading and 60b/s uploading.

Then there is the Pluggy itself. What's the point of adding a microprocessor to the computer without microprocessor. Rather than assuming a pluggy, I would rather assume a minimal 128k extension (no complex IC needed) whose SPI port(s) can reach 180kb/s both ways.

[at67]

The maximum download speed is 3900bytes/s and maximum upload speed is 7.5bytes/s for any of the Arduino solutions, (including Pluggy).

I just realised you probably meant bits per second, so same answers

[veekoo]

In a Commodore Amiga 500, you can use PiStorm to replace CPU and it's a raspberry pi with mc6800x0 emulation software. Maybe it also gives HDMI output. Offcourse it has all the bottlenecks of a Amiga, but slightly faster.

Maybe it doesn't make any sense with TTL computer. We should be using certain components that don't offend the machine.

[veekoo]

I am considering of updating GigatronTTL 64K DEVROM with latest DEVROM, PluggyReloaded firmware, GLCC compiler and compiling all programs again. Is this good spot to do it or is there some unfinished work there?
Last update was 14.2.2022

EDIT: I did update on 1.5.2022. Everything works smoohtly as before. In my own programs the fractals and the lotto, the sources haven't changed lately so I only recompiled them to -rom=dev option. I will share them in github.

EDIT: The new mandelbrot provided in rom clocks 3 minutes. You don't need to update the rom for this only use the proper mandebrot.gt1

[veekoo]

In a Commodore Amiga 500, you can use PiStorm to replace CPU and it's a raspberry pi with mc6800x0 emulation software. Maybe it also gives HDMI output. Offcourse it has all the bottlenecks of a Amiga, but slightly faster.

Maybe it doesn't make any sense with TTL computer. We should be using certain components that don't offend the machine.

I have now seen some ground breaking ideas which support my Raspberry Pi -idea. RPI would run GFX, SFX, IO, RAM, ROM, SDCARD, WIFI, LAN etc. and there would be the "CPU" part using ICs. Mostly the idea is from BAD6502 that 6502 in a PCB is added with RPI and RPI emulates all the different components which are in VIC-20, C64, Commander X16. Same idea would be Z80 and RPI to run various Z80 based retro computer software.

I believe most of the RPI resources would be used to emulate various parts of the Gigatron TTL. It would be huge leap (not a Gigatron TTL clone) everything would upgraded to be "better". Same ICs components would be used, but it would require new PCB and connector to RPI. It would have same functionality as the Gigatron TTL with all added extra cards emulated and software support.

[veekoo]

We already had discussion of mostly hardware. Now lets talk about software which is I think more relevant.
Lets reset the idea of this thread to Roadmap and status of Gigatron TTL.

When should we be expecting these?

Standard ROMs:
ROMv5a -> ROMv5

Special ROMS:
-> ROMvX0

[lb3361]

The current DEVROM is not far from a ROMv5. See the updated TODO list at https://github.com/kervinck/gigatron-ro ... asm.py#L91. Compare with the ROMv5a status https://github.com/kervinck/gigatron-ro ... asm.py#L93.

Here is what is left to do relative to the initial plan (plus comments)

Code: Select all

#  XXX  Add CMPHS/CMPHU instructions to vCPU XXX Still needs testing    [[note: long done in fact]]
#  XXX  Reduce the Pictures application ROM footprint #120.    [[note: or replace pictures with invaders/pacman for instance]]
#  XXX  Main: Better startup chime, eg. sequence the 4 notes and then decay.   [[note: chime is different but still a single note]]
#  XXX  Main: Some startup logo as intro, eg. gigatron letters from the box.   [[note: need rom space, maybe from pictures]]
#  XXX  Racer: Control speed with up/down (better for TypeC controllers)
#  XXX  Racer: Make noise when crashing
#  XXX  Loader: make noise while loading (only channel 1 is safe to use).   [[note: do we want this]]
#  XXX  Faster SYS_Exec_88, with start address (GT1)?      [[note: faster is a big change. start address makes sense]]
#  XXX  Investigate: Babelfish sometimes freezes during power-on?      [[note: I believe this has been fixed]]

Any takers for the remaining tasks?

[veekoo]

Intresting. Can't wait to get my hands on new ROMs. I already purchased tons of spare parts including ROM-chips. I have for example rom-burner and eraser.

[Hans61]

I don't really feel able to write ROM code, otherwise I'd love to help.
In order to get more space in the ROM, Marcel certainly had the idea in ROM 6 with:

# XXX Pucrunch (well documented) or eximozer 3.0.2 (better compression)

https://github.com/mist64/pucrunch

With ZIP I achieve up to 50% savings on gt1 files.