Zet - 8086 PC

[tcdev]

Tonight I managed to get Zet (http://zet.aluzina.org/index.php/Zet_processor) built and booting on the DE1 from an MS-DOS floppy disk image stored in flash.

I built the official DE1 port, with the following fixes:
* 3 absolute paths in 2 verilog files changed to relative paths
* added fl_ce_n_ to top-level and tied to 0.
* added pin location constraint to fl_ce_n_ = AB15

Impressive stuff!!!

[MiniMorph]

Well you did not see the 25 aborted attempts before we got the HDL, BIOS and Virtual Floppy correct !

I am glad you got it working.

I was thinking that Zet would make a good boot loader/ opening menu for a multi-purpose FPGA board.

The reason being this :-
1) FreeDOS speaks native FAT32 :D
2) VGA can make some nice screen modes.
3) There are tons of good quality software tools out there

All the best.

[tcdev]

Well you did not see the 25 aborted attempts before we got the HDL, BIOS and Virtual Floppy correct !

I am glad you got it working.

I was thinking that Zet would make a good boot loader/ opening menu for a multi-purpose FPGA board.

The reason being this :-
1) FreeDOS speaks native FAT32 :D
2) VGA can make some nice screen modes.
3) There are tons of good quality software tools out there

All the best.

Yes I did - see the Zet forums. I registered last night and followed all 12 pages of your trials and tribulations! ;) I even tried all the same bios images and sof files that were uploaded! So I felt your pain too! :p

It'll be great when the SD card hard-disk emulation is going - is that being actively worked on atm? What was the problem with porting the existing SD support - shouldn't that be transparent to the hardware platform?

You read my mind on the latter point!!! We've actually got a board in development atm - for a specific platform, not a generic one - and it has a micro on it for which we need to develop some bootloader/OSD software. The last few days I've been weighing up the possibility of doing a crude sort-of "software emulation environment" for it so we can do the development on a PC rather than using a NIOS on an FPGA as I had planned. Then when I re-visited Zet last night, it struck me that it would be cool to use that as a bootloader - albeit in some future project - for exactly the reasons you outlined!

"Great minds think alike!"... or "Fools never differ" at least! :p

[MiniMorph]

I will start a thread on the Zet Forum to discuss DE1 SD Card on Zet (http://zet.aluzina.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=194&start=0)

Another option for your boot loader may be ZPU :-
http://www.opencores.com/?do=project&who=zpu
http://opensource.zylin.com/zpu.htm

I have not tried it but it looks good for that sort of thing. ZPU would be ideal if you want it to run entirely in the FPGA but still have the performance to do some high end graphics.