Acorn Atom in FPGA

The project goal was to design and build a home-made computer system using the VHDL language and an FPGA chip. Designing one that is compatible with an existing machine avoids the need to write and debug lots of software, and write lots of documentation on how to program it. The ROM, RAM, and CPU were kept external for reasons of efficiency, and analogue circuitry of course. Everything else fits within the FPGA.

This project has had a lot of features done, and so I feel it is okay to put details on the web. It is making progress in bursts as I find time to do it. Most of the complexity lay in cloning the 6847 video chip.

Primary Features

Secondary Features

Surface with hidden face removal

Graphics screen

The Atom character set

The ISO-8859-1 character set

Prototype board layout

This board only exists to hold the ROM, RAM, CPU and some video components. The bulk of the project is implemented inside the FPGA of a BurchEd B5 board, which plugs into it. You can see the date code on the 6502A chip is 8251, making it over 21 years old, but this CPU is still sold by Western Design Centre in speeds up to 14 MHz. I have some parts date coded 0250 and 0251, i.e. 20 years later.

The project currently has 8K of firmware inside the FPGA, so the Flash ROM is not used yet. The CPU could be put inside as well, so a minimal version would need just the RAM chip!


Processor


Video circuitry

New display modes

The original Atom had 256x192 pixels, allowing a 32x16 character screen with 8x12 pixel character cells. Although it isn't practical to provide 80-column text which is common on terminals, many machines could display 40 columns in 320 pixels. The Atari could provide 40 and 44 columns, so I added these display widths. 192 scan lines only allows 16 rows of 8x12-pixel characters. I added the ability to use an 8x8 character font, allowing 50% more rows. Not content with that, I also added a 240-scan line mode.

The new display modes are not known to the original firmware which assumes a 32x16 character text screen. Likewise for new graphics modes. New software must handle the new modes.

Video DACs

The prototype uses DAC and modulator chips that were readily available in DIL packages. In a production model I would use more highly-integrated chips such as those from Analog Devices Inc. They make triple-video-DACs, video buffers and modulators, in surface mount packages.

Baseband Modulator

This converts the analogue RGB signals into Luminance and Chrominance signals, suitable for S-video. This is the next best option of you don't have a SCART socket on your TV. If you don't have S-video input, this chip also mixes Luma and Chroma to provide Composite video.

Cursor

Implemented in hardware to minimise software burden. The 16x16 pixel cursor is held in two bitplanes, allowing cursor pixels to be transparent, inverted, or either of two cursor colours. The cursor works indepently of the background, so it can even appear over a text mode screen.

Mouse interface

This is a hybrid of software and hardware. Software is used for the complex initialisation, and hardware is used to receive data packets from the mouse.

Palette

This defines the colours for text, graphics, cursor, and border. One can do tricks like fading one screen out to black, then fading another screen in.

Font

This has been improved to provide 256 programmable characters of 8x12 pixels. An option register allows character set selection for the original Atom, or an ISO-8859-1/ Unicode page 0 standard. The former allows compatibility with existing software. The latter allows it to display modern computer text. This is pretty much essential for Internet based projects, such as TCP/IP and e-mail.

Colour attributes

One can set the system to use attribute bytes to set the text to one of 8 colours, like so:

colours on black The codes are designed to be compatible with teletext, which assumes a black background. This was usual for computer terminals when teletext was invented, because it reduced stress on monitors.
G o o g l e Today's computers tend to present documents as they appear on paper, i.e. a white background.
colours on white This presents a small problem for presenting documents with a white background. The default teletext text colour is white, which will disappear! Colours such as yellow show up poorly. One solution would be to darken the colours for white backgrounds, and make white text black.
colours on light grey Another might be to use a light gray background, as HTML does.

Teletext screen

Acorn produced a VDU card for the original Atom. It was based on the SAA5050 chip. This provided 40-column text at PAL frame rates, which was an improvement on the 6847 chip. As a bonus, it allowed attributes such as colour and flashing. At the moment, I'm not sure it is worth the effort to implement because the system display logic already allows 40 column text at PAL rates. The Atom firmware could be modified to take advantage of this.

Coloured text is now possible using the colour attribute codes. This is enough to highlight headings, and hyperlinks. Flashing text is not very useful: it is used in HTML and teletext, but the Atom simply is not capable of displaying the complexity of most web pages and teletext is on most TVs already. Reproducing the SAA5050 logic would be worthwhile in a BBC micro project. For now, the basic colour attributes seem enough. Furthe attributes can be implemented as and when required.



Not implemented

RF Modulator

This required a bulky canned modulator. RF modulation degrades the image a little, and isn't really worth providing since most modern TVs have S-video or SCART.

Tape Interface

An analogue tape interface has not been implemented because this requires a fair bit of analogue circuitry and there is not much room left on the prototyping board (some parts of the BurchEd board hang down into the spaces that are apparently free on the prototype board). Tape interfaces were never very fast or reliable, mainly due to the low fidelity of cheap cassette recorders. Maybe minidiscs will be better. However, the digital I/O pins are still implemented, so it should be possible to load and save at digital levels. For example you could write a program to use the PC printer port to load and save. This seems a sensible option since most vintage software is obtained from the internet and not on tape.

Floppy Disk Interface

Not implemented, for many practical reasons. FDC chips are relatively hard and expensive to get, because the main market is for PCs and FDC logic tends to be buried inside a surface-mount PC motherboard chipsets. Old machines had many different disk formats and sizes, so even if it happened to use the PC standard 3.5" drive, you probably would not be able to read it on a PC. Writing a disk operating system to use PC-compatible disks would be a lot of work, and unlikely to be used anywhere else. There are more useful ways of providing PC-compatible mass storage, such as a USB or memory card interface. USB could be used to access USB floppy disk drives, available for notebook computers (though quite expensive). There are also USB Flash-memory devices the size of a key ring fob. These are a much better idea because they are smaller, shock-resistant, and store many times more than a single floppy disk.


Power consumption

Current budget is about:

  7 mA = CMOS CPU consumes less than 4 mA per MHz, thus about 7 mA at 1.77 MHz.
 20 mA = PS/2 mouse (figure from Microsoft Intellimouse)
 31 mA = Video modulator max.
 80 mA = RAM chip (specified for 65 mA typ, 80 mA max operating, 100 uA standby)
186 mA = Three video DACs at 62 mA max each
300 mA = PS/2 keyboard (official budget) in practice they usually draw much less: 
	about 30 to 80 mA, and that is probably mostly for the 3 LEDs.

Current was measured at 440 mA at 5V without Flash ROM or keyboard attached.
The FPGA feels completely cold to the touch.
The RAM is run at less than max rated speed, so probably consumes rather less than its 80 mA maximum
From the figures above one can see that current could be nearly halved by discarding the analogue video parts. Using an LCD would allow this but consume current itself, especially for the backlight.


Design size

Excluding ROM implemented on the FPGA, the design currently uses about 1000 logic blocks.

Unexpected problems

There is a problem which appeared when the system was first implemented. No sign-on message appeared. The address lines suggested the CPU was trying to read the 6522 address repeatedly. I disassembled a bit of the kernel and followed the start-up path. When printing a character it tries to print to the printer first. That routine sits in a loop while the printer is busy. So I changed the write-character vector to skip the printer routine, and the sign-on message appeared. I can only assume the real atom data bus behaves differently when there is no chip driving the data bus, and that the firmware relies on this. The real atom has 4k7 pull-ups on D3..D1.

Heirarchical organisation

Coping with complexity is an issue: the project became so large it became vexing to find where problems lay. The design had to be drastically reworked to have a heirarchical structure, to keep things manageable. The video circuitry works fine, but the CPU interface needs more debugging.

FPGA board modifications

The BurchEd board crystal had to be changed from 20 MHz to a frequency related to the TV colour carrier. Although the BurchEd board can be link-programmed for many frequencies, frequencies that are not an exact multiple of the reference crystal have some jitter. Sometimes this isn't a problem, but in this application it is because it caused the screen image to jitter.

FPGA Upgrade

The B5 boards are now supplied with XC2S300 chips, which provide 50% more logic and 12.5% more RAM. It is from the Spartan 2E family, so there are more ways to drive the I/O pins. The design has been ported to the new device. This required minor edits to the UCF, upgrading from WebPack version 3.3 to 4.2, and solving some problems caused by expressions the new software no longer accepted.

Current Status

The most recent working snapshot of the project powers up, signs on, accepts characters from the PS/2 keyboard and runs BASIC programs that are typed in. Video mode is software-selectable. The video RAM start address is programmable. The Atom's own beep routine works. Everything is working apart from the tape interface. This is reasonably satisfactory.

Firmware is embedded in mostly in the block memory of the FPGA and partly in logic.

Bug fixes

Trivial changes to the VHDL code stopped the CPU working. The logic is not significantly changed, but the internal layout probably has. This may have pushed some timing detail beyond required limits.

One important limit is the data hold time after clock phase 2 falls. This is about 10 ns for the 6502. ROM is selected by valid address, which persists long enough to assert the select signals during the data hold time. The working version selects RAM in the second half of the CPU cycle, while phase 2 is high. Strictly speaking this should cause failure, but in practice it has not - so far. I suspected this might be the cause of the problem and modified the VHDL code to improve it, but this change also stopped it working. So the timing problem lies elsewhere?

This highlights the fact that it is not enough to think in terms of code alone: you have to be aware of physical issues within the FPGA. Projects eventually reach a size beyond which you have to think as a hardware engineer.

To try to remove the possibility of internal data bus conflicts, the single data bus has been split into two: one driven by the CPU during writes, another multiplexing all the data buses during reads.

When upgrading to the 300E, I had to upgrade the VHDL compiler too. This failed to compile code that had been accepted by the previous version. This was due to the compiler being stricter and correctly rejecting 'X' (don't know) states in my address decoder. The correct way is to use '-' (don't care) or avoid them altogether. This tells the compiler to ignore them instead of using 'unknown' values! The design is now robust to changes, though all the mods I had tried have undoubtedly improved the design.

The speaker worked when output bit toggled, but not when the I/O port direction is changed. This was cured by making the direction bit toggle the output bit.

Test switches

These controlled the video settings during video circuitry development and before the CPU interface was present. The video circuitry now seems stable so these switches have been removed. The reset input is now a single pushbutton, and the PAL/NTSC selection input is wired to a single link.


Current intentions

6522 VIA

This provides parallel I/O and timers. It also has many complex features like automatic handshaking for parallel I/O, and being able to clock data in and out through shift registers. These add a considerable amount of logic to write and test. Fortunately MikeJ's Vic20 project had a 6522. After small modifications this was incorporated. BBC BASIC uses the 6522 but is currently having problems. A minimal test program in Atom BASIC succeeded in using timer 1 in free-running mode to generate the 50 Hz interrupts that the BBC firmware requires.

BBC BASIC

This BASIC is a more sophisticated BASIC.

Firmware to RAM?

This is an alternative to firmware in Flash ROM. Nearly a quarter of the available pins are used by the external CPU's address (16), data (8) and control signals. Many of these can be freed if the CPU is inside the FPGA and running the firmware from RAM. This also requires the system to 'boot' the firmware to RAM from an external ROM, but this could be a serial device using very few pins.


Future ideas

Audio DMA

Feeding data to a DAC thousands of times per second is time-consuming for a CPU, so it is preferable to have dedicated hardware to do this. It can be fed from either a sound generator, or a DMA engine sending samples.

Printer and Serial ports

Serial ports open up communication to modems and perhaps the web. Quite what you would do is another matter, as the Atom does not have the processing power, graphics ability or software to run the popular internet applications. However, you might be able to get the project to send (or receive?) simple text emails. So if you have it doing some embedded task, it could inform you as to progress when required.

The large size of the PC market makes it worthwhile for chip manufacturers to produce high-integration devices like the 16c552. This provides two serial ports and one parallel port, all PC compatible, in a single 68-pin PLCC package. There are other chips that have two UARTs, but I don't know of any that throw in a printer port as well. Another bonus is that the PC ports are very well known to many, and there is a lot of example code for it. Code written for the PC should require less porting effort than for other chips.

RS232 Buffers

Non-Volatile Data Storage

This has so much worth discussing it merits a section to itself.

USB Interface

It is possible to put USB interface logic inside the FPGA. There is an EDIF module available but without VHDL source. I suspect this is non-trivial, consuming a third of an X2SC200. Thus it is probably simpler and more economical to use a dedicated USB chip.

The Cypress "EZUSB_80" chip might provide a suitable interface. Note that it is an 80-pin surface mount device.

LCD output

Technically not too difficult to do, since the pixel data signals are available at pins and suitable LCD control signals would not take many more. Economically it isn't so easy. QVGA colour LCD panels are affordable in passive (STN) but this isn't fast enough to cope with rapid screen changes - like motion or cursors). There are some QVGA colour LCD in TFT, which is fast enough but costs over twice as much.

C Cross-Compiler

This is the most common language for serious programming. CC65 is a C compiler for machines with a 6502 processor architecture. It has been ported to around a dozen machines ("targets") already, but not the Atom or the BBC micro - yet. Porting requires the creation of a block of code called a "run-time library", containing the target-specific fundamental functions. Kees van Oss has made a valiant start, especially considering it is his first encounter with C. In at the deep end, even for an experienced 6502 assmbly programmer like Kees.

Being a cross-compiler, programs have to be sent to the 6502 target. Usually this is done by serial port, or sometimes disk. 32K over the PC serial port would take about 34 seconds at 9600 baud, 3 seconds at 115.2 kbaud, or half a second over this system's parallel slave port.

Misc

The construction of the prototype was designed so that it could be used to develop other 6502-based machines. The BBC micro and the Oric for example. Jeri has made modifications to the C1 so that it can be a re-usable platform as well. This project and the C1 are complimentary rather than competitive: the C1 packs as much as it can into the smallest desktop PC motherboard form factor, and has 100's of Watts to play with. My project explores what can fit into a Eurocard format, and currently consumes 2.2 Watts!


Applications

Suggestions welcome! Mainly intended as a demonstration project, it could also be used as a test bed for other peripherals.

Credits

Many thanks to Jeri and Daniel for their correspondence in this project, providing encouragement and technical suggestions.