Proper format of sd card?

[Pierluigi Rolando]

Hi everyone,

Today I *finally* managed to get the FPGA to load the bitstream and display something. Mainly because I was missing a VGA monitor :-)

I'm using monitor_load, it works pretty well from my ubuntu dev vm inside virtualbox if I forward the Digilent USB device to it. In case anyone finds this post looking for information, in order for it to work you need to git clone and make / make install both git clone https://github.com/cambridgehackers/fpgajtag fpgajtag and git clone https://github.com/cambridgehackers/pciescan pciescan -- that's not entirely clear from the instructions. Also, the MODE jumper on the board must be in JTAG mode, and the board must be ON when using monitor_load (more stuff that's probably obvious but I'm a bit unfamiliar with all of this).

Now, what happens next is that the hypervisor (I guess?) keeps complaining about not being able to find the MBR. If I hold shift I get dropped into a menu from which I can 1. configure mega65 or 2. format the sd card. I'm assuming I need to format my sd card, right now it's one big FAT32 partition and from the docs it seems like there should be a special partition at the beginning. However, whether I type 1, 2 or nothing at all, the system seems stuck. The busy LED seems to blink very quickly and no input from the keyboard seems to work (but the keyboard worked fine to press shift, so *something* works).

Question: how do I move on from here? Is there a way to drop into C64 mode automatically (monitor_load ... -4 doesn't do that)? Is there a simple routing in the hypervisor to test the keyboard?

For the records, I've tried both with commit 691a5f6c8222f112609a5249ae15fd102f12179e and 63611c013736d4c66bb1c870d2611cb4b6f4707a.

Thanks!

Pierluigi

[Paul Gardner-Stephen]

Hello,

There is a problem with this at the moment.  To use the MEGA65 without SD card:

monitor_load -b yourbitstream.BIT -k KICKUP.M65 -R 910111.ROM -C charrom.ROM [-4]

If you include the -4, it will drop to C64 mode, instead of C65 mode.

You will find KICKUP.M65 in bin/, the other two files are the C65 ROM and a C64 character ROM.

I hope to track down the SD card problem in the near future.

Paul.

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[Pierluigi Rolando]

Ok that works. I managed to get to the C65 prompt. Unfortunately my keyboard doesn't want to cooperate (with either of the commits I mentioned). If I press a key nothing happens, and if I keep trying at some point I get all keypresses in the world, forever, even if I reset the cpu with cpu reset. The busy LED (which I think is supposed to blink with each keypress?) is basically stuck blinking so fast it doesn't even get to full brightness. I see in git you've done a lot of work on keyboard routines, I'll try with newer bitstreams tomorrow.

I suppose worst-case I can try and assemble something, and have monitor_load dump it into memory instead of 910111.ROM?

Thanks again!

- P

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[LGB Gábor Lénárt]

Hi,

I'm not sure about this, but I also had somewhat similar story. I bought the cheapest keyboard I could get to have a something for the board. Then I realized, no keypress is detected, only if I press the same key multiple times (though there was no endless repeat then for me). I still don't know about the problem, but using another keyboard solved it. Though even the "problematic" keyboard works fine with a PC, I've tried that of course. I'm really not an expert on this, but keyboards has many modes and quirks maybe cheap ones or some models/whatever does not implement everything or at least not it should  be, and they think it's enough for what an average PC uses. But it's just a wild guess, I have no idea for real :( I meant about then generic keyboard stuff "traditional matrix scan now" on M65, not (only?) the $D610 port stuff (hardware accelerated keyboard scan).

[Pierluigi Rolando]

Yep that's what I'm thinking, after trying trying with a different couple of git commits and getting the same result. Unfortunately the only other wired keyboard I have at all is definitely broken (it doesn't even work with my pc). I'll try and get a new one, but it'd be nice to know if there's a known-good model so I don't have to try out a bunch of different ones. For the record, the keyboard I'm trying with is a basic standard keyboard -- no media keys, nothing fancy.

Thanks,

- P