I’ve been struggling for quite a few nights and weekends over the last month or so.

I’ve now successfully attached the J68 to the built-in User Flash Memory. This means that the 16KB (actually about ~13KB) of the ROM monitor VUBUG is now out of the pre-initialized m9k’s configured as a ROM, and now into FLASH. Which is non-volatile, and will survive a reboot. The most important part of this is that it frees up our valuable high-speed on-chip m9k’s.

The solution involved waiting for rd_ena (read enable) to go high, and combining that with the address that makes it a ROM READ, and then passing that to the Altera IP Flash avalon-mm bus interface. Since the latency is a fixed-cycle delay, then I just shift that read-enable pulse to become the “data is ready pulse”, aka data_ack and feed that back to the J68.

I had some more complicated solutions including a state machine, but this way is clearly superior. I had created some bolt-on hardware to help troubleshoot the problem. While it helped initially, when I had the problem fixed, some symptoms in the add-on hardware hid the fact that it was actually working….

The SDRAM controller works in simulation when connected to the J68, and hopefully will be tested on hardware very soon. This puts the ROM code in FLASH, and the RAM on the 8MB memory chip where it belongs. This will give us what we need for future development, including the GPU!