RorschachUK

Congratulations Jack!

Hi, check to make sure that in the Tools / Programmer menu, 'Papilio Programmer' is the selected programmer? Also, if you pick the Hyperion variant for LogicStart and LX9, there's examples included for outputting LCD 16x2 text to a 'virtual' LCD on a VGA screen, via a drop-in replacement for the Arduino LiquidCrystal.h library.

Great progress! I'd wondered if the first power-on CMOS settings would be a problem, in MAME the first time you start a Williams game it makes you go through all that factory settings press advance nonsense, but saves it into some sort of non-volatile CMOS memory and boots properly afterwards. Grabbing a snapshot of already-setup values sounds easier than reimplementing saving to CMOS with FLASH or EEPROM or something. Oh and just in case any observers are thinking that bottom screenshot shows horrible corrupted graphics, that's just what Robotron does normally when a level starts!

Magnus did tell me on purchase that "Unlike the Papilio boards, this board is also fully supported by all the Xilinx tools (Impact, ChipScope, SDK etc.) using the Digilent driver plugin.", although having no prior experience of using ISE outside of using the Papilio boards with WebPack I didn't really appreciate what this really amounted to.

Would completing this also unlock the other Williams games of the era, which look to be on more or less the same hardware, control schemes aside? Defender, Joust, Sinistar all start up with that rainbow visual noise memory test and pinball-esque sound effects suggesting they're reusing routines from each other, so I'd be surprised if the hardware platforms are much different.

I believe there was mention hereabouts of a Mac OS X version too?

Hi, I'm not quite clear about your post, particularly about GCC or version 1.0. But I shall assume that what you're wanting to do is use ZAP Arduino environment with Papilio Pro. So, for starters the thing you need to install is this: ZAP ZPUino Arduino Papilio - it's version 2.05, although it's based around Arduino 1.5.2. If you've got that installed, you can start it up (Arduino.exe) - it's visually unchanged from the standard Arduino environment which I hope you're already familiar with. The differences are in the menus - in the Tools menu, you will be able to select various flavours of Papilio boards. For a Papilio Pro you will have choices such as selecting one with VGA support built in for either a Logic Start or Arcade Megawing. If you have one of these add-on boards and want to try the VGA examples, pick one of those board entries from the menu. Also in the Tools menu you should pick the right serial port for the board and select 'Papilio programmer' from the Programmer submenu. Finally before you can send any programs to the Papilio Pro you will need to select the 'Burn Bootloader' option from the Tools menu - this sends the bitfile for the selected flavour of ZPUino to the Papilio's FLASH. Once the bootloader's flashed to the board, you will be able to send Arduino programming to it using the Send toolbar button same as with a regular Arduino. Hope that was what you wanted to do - if not, some more detail would be needed.

Ah - the small subset of items already converted to Papilio aren't what I was looking for, rather the large amount of other games, consoles and computers that haven't been converted to Papilio that were previously mentioned on the old FPGAArcade website, I wondered if any might work on Pipistrello LX45. So there's Jack's at GitHub [here] and yours at Google Code [here].

Do we know where? I couldn't find any Github links there.

Great stuff - this version displays correctly on my screens, and a quick check with PAPER 1 etc shows the red and green channels are hooked up the right way round too. I don't have any Oric tapes or tape-to-audio converters yet, will the clock change affect loading programs?

Hi, recompiled (resynthesized?) with the new tweaks from Github, still didn't display but *almost* did on the big TV, when I caught a glimpse of what looked like alternating black and white block stripes on bootup but then vanished to 'mode not supported' blackness. Does B&W block stripes sound like what an Oric does on power-up? The Pacman and bouncing ball bitfiles came from the Pipistrello front page at Saanlima.com, no source given for either though so I can't say - presumably Magnus compiled these. To end on a success story though - have had the 48K Spectrum bitfile successfully loading games from WAV files generated from TZX files!

Must be more to it than just the pixel clock frequency though, since PacMan displays over HDMI and that's 24MHz too. Resolutions? Another experiment - BombJack doesn't display on the small display I use for development but does on the main TV. Small display is 10.1" Lilliput FA1011-np, main TV is Samsung PS50C7000. So that's Spectrum, bouncing ball, VTC_Demo and Pacman working on either display, Oric not working on either and Bombjack working on the big TV but not the 10" display, all over HDMI.

OK so I just rebuilt - the only change I'd made previously was pre-emptively editing the UCF to disable PMOD PS/2 and enable it on Arcade wing instead (as I'd also done on the Spectrum one), so I reverted that 'just in case'. Was indeed 35 warnings. Flashed it to the Pipistrello, still no joy from the 'small' monitor I was testing with that works OK with the Spectrum one, took it through to main TV, didn't work on that one either although the TV did at least acknowledge it was trying by saying 'Mode not supported' - it wasn't quite helpful enough to tell me what mode it was trying, but I'm guessing whatever it is differs from whatever the Spectrum implementation was trying. Oh, also I had to drop '/trunk' from the SVN checkout command listed in Github to get the source as otherwise it said it couldn't be found - but I doubt that's any connection to the HDMI modes.

Hi, after getting the Spectrum implementation running on my new Pipistrello (arrived today), I tried the Oric one too, but so far didn't seem to work, or at least my monitor thinks no signal whereas it sees one with the Spectrum and the various bouncing ball etc bitfiles.. Is there any other step to do, like maybe build ROMs or set configuration constants or similar? Are the timings any different to the Spectrum one such that my monitor might be happy with that one and not this one?

Nice - have had this working on the Papilio Pro with 32K mem and VGA on the Arcade MegaWing, and just now also on the Pipistrello over HDMI with 48K. I notice though that in the Pipistrello HDMI version, red and green channels are swapped round - "Border 2" is supposed to give you a red border, gives green, and likewise "Border 4" gives green where it should give red. I fixed this editing the UCF to swap the <2>s and <1>s round on TMDS_P and _N, but I don't know if there's a more 'correct' place to fix it.