Technical questions about OSSC

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  • November 17, 2016 at 11:15 AM #9645
    LocoMJ
    Participant

      Hi,

      I’m a guy from Spain and I´m engineer in electronics. This year I’ve come back to the university to course a master about FPGAs. I have to make a work related with FPGA technologies and I’m thinking about some homebrew projects. Between all projects I’ve seen, I choose flashcarts from Krizz, nes2hdmi, GDEmu and OSSC.

      So, I would like to make some questions to Marqs. Here they go:

      – Why did you select an altera FPGA (EP4CE15E22) and why not another one from Xilinx for example? Are there any good reasons?
      – Where is saved the bitstream?
      – Do you use any soft core in OSSC?

      I would like this post could be a post to ask technical questions about OSCC.

      Thanks for such a great scaler 🙂
      Best regards

      November 17, 2016 at 9:05 PM #9665
      marqs
      Participant

        – Why did you select an altera FPGA (EP4CE15E22) and why not another one from Xilinx for example? Are there any good reasons?
        There was a couple reasons behind I ended up with EP4CE15E22:
        * FPGA had to be relatively cheap and hand-solderable (no BGAs)
        * During early development I used DE2-115 development board which had higher-end Cyclone IV FPGA, so it was easy transition to EP4CE15E22
        * My short experience with Xilinx’s tools (ISE) wasn’t very positive, although I have to say they didn’t suck nearly as badly as many ASIC design tools. While Quartus is not perfect either, it has worked better for me
        * Xilinx’s FPGAs seemed to be more geared towards professional design instead of hobbyist prototyping (availability, pricing etc.). Take a look e.g. how many Xilinx FPGAs Mouser offers versus Altera

        Where is saved the bitstream?
        It’s saved on a serial flash IC, which FPGA automatically reads at power-on

        Do you use any soft core in OSSC?
        Yes, it uses basic (free) version of Nios 2. If I had more time on my hands, I’d rather put LM32 or RISC-V running on the FPGA

        November 17, 2016 at 11:04 PM #9670
        LocoMJ
        Participant

          Thanks for the answers, marqs!

          In the future, I’d like to help to improve the OSSC, or even make something related with old machines and FPGAs.

          I also have the DE1 board but I’m still a newbie in this matters.

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