This week I changed my focus to the design review and document. I took this as an opportunity to further understand the PPU and how it interacts with other systems. I think this helped a lot since I now have a much clearer view of how the PPU and its interactions with the rest of the system will play out. I am excited to start working on this part of the system once the CPU is done.
We decided to be proactive about the design document so we started working on it throughout the week. To do this, we had to do further research and we also incorporated the feedback from the presentations to further flesh out parts of our project that we thought were not well defined such as our metrics and evaluation, so did our classmates. To do so, we looked at the performance of other emulators and try to pick based on varying levels of success. We are going to be using Verilog Boy as our baseline performance goal. We do this because that is the best emulator that we found in our area (hardware).
For the design document, I wrote the abstract, the design requirements, the architecture and principle of operation, the CPU sub-system description, the PPU sub-system description, and related work.
Next week we plan to go full force into implementation and have ambitious goals for the end of spring break. My personal plans for the end of spring break are as follows:
- Get a working CPU implementation with interrupts disabled.
- Get a working PPU implementation, try some display tests.
Failing to achieve these goals may put the success of our project into question since we still have to deal with integration.
