Saturday 27 October 2012

Too much going on!

I feel a bit guilty that I've neglected my FPGA project for a while now...

As you know, I kind of put the emulator project on hold early on in the summer so I could focus on my demo for Sundown. Well, that's been and gone, but after winning the old school compo at Sundown and getting a PC-FX as my prize, I spent about a month doing nothing but trying to get some code running on that. Then, I went to the really fun poolside demoparty at Main and since then I've been looking into raymarching and WebGL...

Today, I had another look at the FPGA project. I thought I'd broken the JTAG scan again when I was trying to demo it at Sundown and something wasn't working, but it looks like there's a "feature" of the USB serial democode that causes a timeout to happen if the host isn't reading the AVR chip... and so my JTAG code was running at about 2 bits per second unless the virtual serial port was connected to. I've managed to speed this up a bit and so now the timeout overhead is only about 80%, but it's still something I'd like to fix properly.