So Busy

Well it's the time of year when Engineering Students set up camp at the lab finishing up all their projects before the end of the semester. I spent all of Friday-Early Saturday morning in the computer lab. After a brief rest I then spent most of Saturday in the lab again.

Why?

Because we are having trouble integrating the Pretendo. It turns out the processor control was written in a way that will not synthesize properly on the FPGA. A couple of us with more Verilog experience pointed this out to the processor team and spent the rest of the time advising them on what to fix. We also found some problems in the processor and cache with paths that apparently looped around (it seems the compiler wasn't creating muxes or something). So we worked out some restructured code that will hopefully compile better.

To top everything off our timing sim showed that the cache wasn't making some memory timing contraints. The cache designer went back and will have it fixed by tonight. Hopefully everything will be together by Monday.

Pretendo Update

As of Monday the MPU (video part) of my groups game console appears to be working! We have transparent sprites and everything! (after some scaling the thing back slightly)

Once our processor guys get done we can play some pong! W00t!

Friday night beatdown

There is nothing like 2 hours of people hitting on you with sticks to make you feel alive. Or just feel a ton of bruises and blisters. Is there a difference?

You may ask yourself "Why am I letting people hit me with sticks?". One word. Kendo. For those of you who don't know, Kendo is the Japanese Martial Art of Swordfighting. Its the technique the Samurai used while wielding their Katana's (and other swords or even naginatas). In modern Kendo (which I am participating in) we use a bamboo sword called a Shinai to practice attacks. This involves you hitting someone and them hitting you back for a couple hours. You don't go totally unprotected you do have a set of Bogu (armor) to absorb some of the damage but misses (people hitting your non-armored areas) are very common.

Of course that doesn't really answer why. The main reason is it allows one to develop discipline and concentration, as a Kendo practitioner tries to develop mushin. It's also a fun couple hours and gets you some exercise :).

Bowling Results

Well the results are in for bowling tonight (well I think they are we'll see). We won the first two games with the first one having a margin of over 60 points. Of course we lost the last game by about 10pins which sucks. In any case we should have points for our two wins and for the series. Not bad considering we played the #1 team this week.

Well I should get to bed as class waits for no one.

Emulation!

I've managed to finish the video/gui part of the emulator the Pretendo project! That's right you can look at beatiful background colors on screen! (I still need to do line doubling :( but that's another problem)

Now I just need to get the cpu emulator incorporated and I'll be done with SOME of my schoolwork!

Been Awhile

Well its been awhile since I updated this thing. Nothing like being incredible busy with no free time :(.

My classes are hitting the stage where you spend all your free time working on projects. Of course all my classes are this way so it really sucks. In 554 we got the display working on our game console so now you can look at background tiles/images. We also coded up sprite support so we should be able to have moving objects as well! YEAH!

Well working on 554 is about all I've been up to lately so this is one boring update. I'll hopefully have more to talk about later.