This week Adolfo and Tess worked on finishing the overall system by running the Blargg test suite. At the beginning of the week they had almost all the components needed to run the tests. After the mid-semester demo, they completed and put everything together. They worked on debugging and fixing issues that came up during the extensive and thorough testing. At the end, they were able to pass all the tests and now they are moving towards putting the system on the board.
Tess is working on getting the entire system on the board. She used the Megafunction wizard to set up memory and is currently compiling the entire system in Quartus. She will be working on getting Tetris running by the end of the week and then she will move onto memory bank switching.
Adolfo also worked on the PPU. His first goal was to display a background. When he was able to display that, he moved on to displaying static images. With this, he and Tess can start debugging on the board because he can display the result on the screen now. After this he worked on scrolling. He got scrolling working, but since our first goal is to run Tetris, he is moving onto displaying sprites.
Pratyusha set up internet on the board to get opkg to install relevant packages. She also detected the NES controller on the board, and is trying to compile the missing kernel modules and load them onto the board, to use joydev a the driver that converts the signals from the USB port to signals that can be used. The alternative to that, would be individually manipulating the latch, clock and data lines on the USB port to the controller, while reading and buffering data, after which we’d have to interpret it.
She also started working on memory component, and is trying to configure the AXI buses on Qsys to be able to talk to the SDRAM. Her goal is to get the unit tests for the NES controller working next week, and move further along on running Qsys and being able to access SDRAM from SoC.