Craig J. Bishop

“But what if every button is also a screen?”

Over the last few years, Rust tooling for embedded development has become quite good.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the same JTAG cable used to configure a FPGA could also debug a RISC-V core implemented in the fabric?

eBay is a magical place, somewhere in the middle of the vast AliExpress-Digikey spectrum… well, it is magical for those interested in giant FPGA parts anyway.

What do Rust, Risc-V, and SpinalHDL all have in common?

This week I had the awesome opportunity to interview David Galloway, a long-time game developer across many platforms.

The embedded Rust development ecosystem is changing fast.

Here’s the Gameslab schematic in all of its completely non-cost-optimized glory!

These are the slides from a talk I gave at Desert Rust, our Phoenix metro area Rust developer meetup.

The Gameslab case is made of three custom-machine aluminum plates and held together by only four screws.

On the way to a working Gameslab, I had a few failures, some more “fun” than others.

If you went to Hackaday Supercon 2019, you might have seen someone wandering around with a badge that was way too heavy looking.

A few months ago, I bought a couple Xilinx Zynq XC7Z035s off of eBay.

I recently scored a couple of XC7Z035s on Ebay from a chip seller in China!

So far, the SlabBoy CPU can perform arithmetic operations and load 8-bit immediate values.

It’s been a little while, but in the last post I showed my SpinalHDL implementation of the Z80-ish ALU, part of the Game Boy’s LR35902 CPU.

In the last post, I showed the test bench that loads an assembled Game Boy binary program, and we looked at the waveform output showing that the instruction fetch cycle worked.

In the last post, I started talking about the internal cycles of the LR35902 CPU.

For a long time now, I’ve wanted to build some hardware emulators of older game consoles on an FPGA.

I recently started using an app called Be Focused Pro for focusing using the Pomodoro technique to focus a bit better.

I’ve been playing around the last few days building a Microblaze processor system on the Digilent Atlys Spartan 6 board.

I finally decided I might as well make an overall block diagram of the Gameslab system.

While working on the DDR3 interface of the re-imagined Gameslab, I wanted to do some simple sanity checks for signal integrity.

I bought one of the PSP LCD screens from Sparkfun forever ago, planning on building some kind of game console-like device with it.

Before I write much about my Gameslab project, I think it’s worth looking back at my Gamesphere project from over four years ago.