After spring break, I worked with the team on alternative project ideas. We considered switching to a software emulator, and I began looking into the requirements/languages used/ benchmarks, etc. I also looked up sample projects and test suites.
However, after Jens mentioned Professor Nace would potentially ship us each boards, we collectively considered and are now scrapping the audio portion of GameBoi.
I thought through tests to verify that the game switching and controller driver work.
As mentioned in the Statement of Work, (taken from the SOW)
“since the SoC will house the persistent memory, it will hold game state and will need to transfer the game bits depending on the game that the user wants to play. To check this, once we transfer the bits, we will sum all of the stored bits in both the FPGA and persistent memory. If the sums are the same, we can reasonably assume that none of the information was corrupted. Additionally, we will attempt to read in a game to the FPGA, then the FPGA will read the information back to the SoC untouched. If the bits all match, then we have proven that two way communication between the FPGA and SoC are correct. To test our game switching, we will run the above test consecutively, but use a different game in each iteration. “
“To test the controller driver, we will map each button of the controller to an LED. The LEDs that correspond to the pressed buttons must be on until the buttons are released. This will prove that we are able to receive the right signals from one or more buttons of the controller at any time. “
I (hopefully for good) sorted out connection problems between my VM on mac and the DE10-Standard Board. I managed to run a simple program on the DE10-standard board.
I was debating between using a Linux Desktop Environment and a Linux Console BSP, but I’ll probably go with the latter, as there seems to be no need for a Desktop Environment.
I am waiting on an SD card to be able to flash the image onto the card and the SOC.
For the upcoming week, I hope to
- Get the ConsoleLinux booted onto the SOC
- Run a basic MMIO program such as writing to the LED/ using switches to communicate to LED through SOC
- (Stretch) Reading button presses from NES controller.