Converting my 65C816 computer project to 3.3 V

I recently spent some time re-building my 65C816 computer project to run at 3.3 volts, instead of 5 volts which it used previously. This blog post covers some of things I needed to take into consideration for the change.

It involved making use of options which I added when I designed this test board, as well as re-visiting all of the mistakes in that design.

Re-cap: Why 3.3 V is useful

One of the goals of this project is to build a modern computer which uses a 65C816 CPU, using only in-production parts.

A lot of interesting retro chips run at 5 V, but it’s much easier to find modern components which run at 3.3 V. I can make use of these options without adding level-shifting if I can switch important buses and control signals to 3.3 V.

ROM

The ROM chip is the most visible change, because the chip has a different footprint. When assembling this board for 5 V use, I used used an AT28C256 Parallel EEPROM, in a PDIP-28 ZIF socket. I couldn’t find 3.3 V drop-in replacement for this, so I added a footprint for a SST39LF010 flash chip, which has a similar-enough interface.

This was the first time I’ve soldered a surface-mount PLCC socket. I attempted to solder this with hot air, which was unsuccessful, so I instead cut the center of the socket out so that I could use a soldering iron. I then added a small square of 1000 GSM card (approx 1mm thick) as a spacer under the chip.

I also added a new make target to build the system ROM for this chip, which involves padding the file to a larger size, and invoking minipro with a different option so that it could write the file. I’m using a TL866II+ for programming, and adapter boards are available for programming PLCC-packaged chips.

$ make flashrom_sst39lf010
cp -f rom.bin rom_sst39lf010.bin
truncate -s 131072 rom_sst39lf010.bin
minipro -p "SST39LF010@PLCC32" -w rom_sst39lf010.bin
Found TL866II+ 04.2.126 (0x27e)
Warning: Firmware is newer than expected.
  Expected  04.2.123 (0x27b)
  Found     04.2.126 (0x27e)
Chip ID OK: 0xBFD5
Erasing... 0.40Sec OK
Writing Code...  8.38Sec  OK
Reading Code...  1.18Sec  OK
Verification OK

UART

The UART chip is an NXP SC16C752B, which is 3.3 V or 5 V compatible. I rescued one of these from an adapter board (previous experiment). This was my first time de-soldering a component with hot air gun. Hopefully it still works!

My FTDI-based USB/UART adapter has a configuration jumper which I adjusted to 3.3 V.

Clock, reset and address decode

I again used a MIC2775 supervisory IC for power-on reset, though the exact part was different. I previously used a MIC2275-46YM5 (4.6 V threshold), where the re-build used a MIC2275-31YM5 (3.1 V threshold).

I needed a 1.8432 MHz oscillator for the UART. The 3.3 V surface-mount part I substituted in had a different footprint, which I had prepared for.

I also prepared for this change by using an ATF22LV10 PLD for address decoding, which is both 3.3 V and 5 V compatible. The ATF22V10 which I used for earlier experiments works at 5 V only.

SD card

I installed the DEV-13743 SD card module more securely this time by soldering it in place and adding some double-sided tape as a spacer. This module is compatible with 3.3 V or 5 V.

The level-shifting and voltage regulation on this module is now superfluous, so I could probably simplify things by adding an SD card slot and some resistors directly in a later revision.

Modifications

There are three errors in the board which I know about (all described in my earlier blog post). This is my second time fixing them, so I tried to make sure the modifications were neat and reliable this time.

Firstly, the flip-flop used as a clock divider is wired up incorrectly, so I cut a trace and run a wire under the board.

Second, the reset button pin assignments are incorrect. Simply rotating the button worked on the previous board, but it wasn’t fitted securely. This this time I cut one of the legs and ran a short wire under the board, and the modification is barely noticeable.

Lastly, the address bus is wired incorrectly into the chip which selects I/O devices. I previously worked around this in software, but this time I cut two traces and ran two wires (the orange wires in the picture). I made an equivalent modification to the 5 V board, so that I could update the software and test it.

The wire I was using for these mods is far too thick and inflexible. I’ve added some 30 AWG silicon-insulated wire to my inventory for the next time I need to do this type of work, which should be more suitable.

Wrap-up

I transferred components from the old board, and attempted to boot it every time I made change. The power-on self test routine built in to the ROM showed that each new chip was being detected, and I soon had a working 65C816 test board again, now running at 3.3 V. I’m using my tiny linear power supply module to power it.

I can now interface to a variety of chips which only run at 3.3 V. This opens up some interesting possibilities for adding peripherals, which I hope to explore in future blog posts.

It will be more difficult to remove and re-program the ROM chip going forward though. This is hopefully not a problem, since can now run code from an SD card or serial connection as well (part 1, part 2).

Porting the Amiga bouncing ball demo to the NES

Earlier this year, I ported the Amiga bouncing ball demo to the Nintendo Entertainment System. This is a video capture from a NES emulator.

I completed this back in January, but I’m only publishing this blog post now, because I was considering entering it into a demo competition.

How it works

If you are familiar with NES development, then you will probably notice that there is nothing ground-breaking going on here. The ball is made up of 64 8×8 sprites, bouncing around the screen over a static background.

There are two different versions of the ball in sprite memory, and with some palette swapping, this can be stretched to 4 frames of animation, just enough to make the ball appear to spin.

There is enough sprite memory to extend this to 8 frames of animation without any banking tricks, but I would need to start again from scratch to achieve that.

Pre-rendered 3D

I drew the ball in Blender, with twice the number of segments required for the final image. This is a UV sphere with 8 rings, and 32 segments.

I coloured each face with one of 4 colours, then rendered it with the Workbench renderer, which I had configured to use Flat lighting, no anti-aliasing, and the texture colour.

I also tilted the ball.

This gave me a crisp, high-resolution ball with solid colours.

To test the idea, I processed this down to a 64×64 image on a transparent background. I need to substitute colours, so there is no antialiasing here.

I then wrote up a Python script to swap out colours to make the 4-frame pattern. Note that frames 3 and 4 are the same as frames 1 and 2, but with white and red swapped.

I ran this through ImageMagick to convert it into a GIF preview.

convert -delay 3.5 -loop 0 *.png animation.gif

The result appeared workable, so I went about making the same animation in a NES rom.

NES implmentation

On the NES, it’s not possible to create the spinning ball effect with palette changes only, because it would require four colours plus transparency. To overcome this, I split the image into two frames, each stored as two colours plus transparency, which is possible.

To start the code, I checked out a fresh copy of Brad Smith’s NES example project, then deleted things that I didn’t need.

When working with sprites on the NES, it is typical to store object attributes in RAM, then perform a DMA operation once per frame to copy this over to the Picture Processing Unit (PPU). For this project, I wanted to try setting up two different copies of the object attribute memory in RAM – one for each of the two rotations.

This should allow me to set any of the four frames by choosing between two possible colour palettes, and two possible DMA source addresses. This worked, and the first milestone was a spinning ball.

Switching between two DMA sources did not save much effort in the end, because I still needed quite a lot of code to set the X/Y positions of 64 sprites each frame. I set up some assembler macros to help with this.

Physics and sound

I have made one NES game before, and I was not happy with the physics. For this project, I wanted to do a bit better.

For the X position, I use a fixed speed, and simple collision detection with left/right boundaries. The animation frame is calculated from the X position, so the ball changes rotation depending on which direction it is moving, just like the Amiga demo.

The Y location of the ball is a simple loop, and follows the absolute value of a sine wave. I pre-computed this with some Python.

My last project also had no sound, so I read up on the NES APU, and added some noise when the ball changes direction.

Development setup

Since my last NES project, I have improved my development setup quite a bit. As always, I am using the ca65 assembler on Linux.

Previously, I was using a text editor. I have since moved to a custom 6502 assembly plugin on PyCharm, which allows me to quickly jump to definitions/usages. I developed this for my other 65C02 and 65C816 projects, which you can read about on this blog.

When I click run, I’ve set up the project to assemble a NES ROM, then launch with fceux, which has debugging features.

The debug features were previously only available on Windows builds of fceux, so when I made this demo, I was running the emulator via WINE. This has been added to the Linux builds as of v2.5.0, so I’ll most likely switch to that for my next project.

Wrap-up

I learn something new every time I write code for the NES, and it’s a lot of fun to make simple demos for these old systems. It’s also refreshing to create something standalone which I can explain through screenshots, instead of pages of assembly code.

For those who do want to read pages of assembly code, though, this project is up on GitHub at mike42/nes-ball-demo.

Let’s make a bootloader – Part 2

In my previous blog post, I wrote about loading and executing a 512 byte program from an SD card for my 65C816 computer project.

For part 2, I’ll look at what it takes to turn this into a bootloader, which can load a larger program from the SD card. I want the bootloader to control where to read data from, and how much data to load, which will allow me to change the program structure/size without needing to update the code on ROM.

Getting more data

The code in my previous post used software interrupts to print some text to the console, and my first challenge was to implement a similar routine for loading additional data from external storage.

The interface from the bootloader is quite simple: it sets a few registers to specify the source (a block number), destination memory address, and number of blocks to read, then triggers a software interrupt. The current implementation can read up to 64 KiB of data from the SD card each time it is called.

ROM_READ_DISK := $03
; other stuff ...
    ldx #$0000                      ; lower 2 bytes of destination address
    lda #$01                        ; block number
    ldy #$10                        ; number of blocks to read - 8 KiB
    cop ROM_READ_DISK               ; read kernel to RAM

Higher memory addresses

To load data in to higher banks (memory addresses above $ffff, I set the data bank register.

I needed to update a lot of my code to use absolute long (24-bit) addressing for I/O access, where it was previously using absolute (16-bit) addressing, for example:

sta $0c00

In my assembler, ca65, I already use the a: prefix to specify 16-bit addressing. I learned here that I can use the f: prefix for 24-bit addressing.

sta f:$0c00

Without doing this, the assembler chooses the smallest possible address size. This is fine in a 65C02 system, but I find it less helpful on the 65C816, where the meaning of a 16-bit address depends on the data bank register, and the meaning of an 8-bit address depends on the direct page register.

New bootloader

With the ROM code sorted out, I went on to write the new bootloader.

This new code sets the data bank address, then uses a software interrupt to load 8 KiB of data to address $010000

; boot.s: 512-byte bootloader. This utilizes services defined in ROM.
ROM_PRINT_STRING := $02
ROM_READ_DISK := $03

.segment "CODE"
    .a16
    .i16
    jmp code_start

code_start:
    ; load kernel
    ldx #loading_kernel             ; Print loading message (kernel)
    cop ROM_PRINT_STRING
    phb                             ; Save current data bank register
    .a8                             ; Set data bank register to 1
    php
    sep #%00100000
    lda #$01
    pha
    plb
    plp
    .a16
    ldx #$0000                      ; lower 2 bytes of destination address
    lda #$01                        ; block number
    ldy #$10                        ; number of blocks to read - 8 KiB
    cop ROM_READ_DISK               ; read kernel to RAM
    plb                             ; Restore previous data bank register

    ldx #boot                       ; Print boot message
    cop ROM_PRINT_STRING
    jml $010000

loading_kernel: .asciiz "Loading kernel\r\n"
boot: .asciiz "Booting\r\n"

.segment "SIGNATURE"
    wdm $42                         ; Ensure x86 systems don't recognise this as bootable.

The linker configuration for the bootloader is unchanged from part 1.

A placeholder kernel

The bootloader needed some code to load. I don’t have any real operating system to load, so I created the “Hello World” of kernels to work with in the meantime.

This is the simplest possible code I can come up with to test the bootloader. This assembles to 3 machine-language instructions, which occupy just 6 bytes. It is also is position-independent, and will work from any memory bank.

; kernel_tmp.s: A temporary placeholder kernel to test boot process.

ROM_PRINT_CHAR   := $00

.segment "CODE"
    .a16
    .i16
    lda #'z'
    cop ROM_PRINT_CHAR
    stp

The linker configuration for this, kernel_tmp.cfg, creates an 8 KiB binary.

MEMORY {
    ZP:     start = $00,    size = $0100, type = rw, file = "";
    RAM:    start = $0200,  size = $7e00, type = rw, file = "";
    PRG:    start = $e000,  size = $2000, type = ro, file = %O, fill = yes, fillval = $00;
}

SEGMENTS {
    ZEROPAGE: load = ZP,  type = zp;
    BSS:      load = RAM, type = bss;
    CODE:     load = PRG, type = ro,  start = $e000;
}

The commands I used to assemble and link the bootloader are:

ca65 --feature string_escapes --cpu 65816 --debug-info boot.s
ld65 -o boot.bin -C boot.cfg boot.o

The commands I used to assemble and link the placeholder kernel are:

ca65 --feature string_escapes --cpu 65816 --debug-info kernel_tmp.s
ld65 -o kernel_tmp.bin -C kernel_tmp.cfg kernel_tmp.o

I assembled the final disk image by concatenating these files together.

cat bootloader/boot.bin kernel_tmp/kernel_tmp.bin > disk.img

I used the GNOME disk utility to write the image to an SD card, which helpfully reports that I’m not using all of the available space.

Result

It took me many attempts to get the ROM code right, but this did work. This screen capture shows the test kernel source code on the left, which is being executed at the end of the boot-up process.

If I wanted to load the kernel from within a proper filesystem on the SD card (eg. FAT32), then I would need to update the starting block in the bootloader (hard-coded to 1 at the moment).

The limitations of this mechanism are that the kernel needs to be stored contiguously, be sector-aligned, and located within the first 64 MiB of the SD card.

Speed increase

This was the first time that I wrote code for this system and needed to wait for it to execute. The CPU was clocked at just 921.6 KHz. My SPI/SD card code was also quite generic, and was optimised for ease of debugging rather than execution speed.

I improved this from two angles. My 65C816 test board allows me to use a different clock speed for the CPU and UART chip, so I sped the CPU up to 4 MHz by dropping in an 8 MHz oscillator (it is halved to produce a two-phase clock). As I sped this up, I also needed to add more retries to the SD card initialisation code, since it does not respond immediately on power-up.

I also spent a lot of time hand-optimising the assembly language routine to receive a 512-byte block of data from the SD card. There is room to speed this up further, but it’s fast enough to not be a problem for now.

I had hoped to load an in-memory filesystem (ramdisk) alongside the test kernel, but I’ve deferred this until I can compress it, since reading from SD card is still quite slow.

A debugging detour

Writing bare-metal assembly with no debugger is very rewarding when it works, and very frustrating when there is something I’m not understanding correctly.

I ran into one debugging challenge here which is obvious in hindsight, but I almost couldn’t solve at the time.

This code is (I assure you) a bug-free way to print one hex character, assuming the code is loaded in bank 0. I was using this to hexdump the code I was loading into memory.

.a8                             ; Accumulator is 8-bit
.i16                            ; Index registers are 16-bit
lda #0                          ; A is 0 for example
and #$0f                        ; Take low-nibble only
tax                             ; Transfer to X
lda f:hex_chars, X              ; Load hex char for X
jsr uart_print_char             ; Print hex char for X

hex_chars: .byte '0', '1', '2', '3', '4', '5', '6', '7', '8', '9', 'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f'

The problem I had was that if the data bank register was 0, this would print ASCII character ‘0’ as expected. But if the data bank register was 1, it would print some binary character.

Nothing in this code should be affected by the data bank register, so I went through a methodical debugging process to try to list and check all of my assumptions. At one point, I even checked that the assembler was producing the correct opcode for this lda addressing mode (there are red herrings on the mailing lists about this).

I was able to narrow down the problem by writing different variations of the code which should all do the same thing, but used different opcodes to get there. This quickly revealed that it was the tax instruction which did not work as I thought, after finding that I could get the code working if I avoided it:

.a8                             ; Accumulator is 8-bit
.i16                            ; Index registers are 16-bit
ldx #0                          ; X is 0 for example
lda f:hex_chars, X              ; Load hex char for X
jsr uart_print_char             ; Print hex char for X

hex_chars: .byte '0', '1', '2', '3', '4', '5', '6', '7', '8', '9', 'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f'

My first faulty assumption was that if I set the accumulator to 0, then transferring the accumulator value to X would set the X register to 0 as well.

.a8                             ; Accumulator is 8-bit
.i16                            ; Index registers are 16-bit
lda #0                          ; Accumulator is 0
tax                             ; X is 0?

On this architecture, there are two bits of CPU status register which specify the size of the accumulator and index registers. When the accumulator is 8-bits, only the lower 8-bits of the 16-bit value are set by lda. I hadn’t realised that when the index registers are set to 16-bit, the tax instruction transfers all 16 bits of the accumulator to the X register (regardless of the accumulator size), which was causing surprising results.

Far away from the bug-free code I was focusing on, I had used a lazy method to set the data bank register, which involved setting the accumulator to $0101.

My second faulty assumption was that the data bank register was involved at all – in fact lda #$0101 would have been enough to break the later code.

.a16
lda #$0101                      ; Set data bank register to 1
pha
plb
plb

To fix this, when switching to an 8-bit accumulator, I now zero out the high 8-bits.

.a8
lda #0                          ; zero out the B accumulator
xba

Alternative boot method

I also added an option to boot from serial, based on my implementation of an XMODEM receive function for the 6502 processor.

This is a bit like PXE boot for retro computers. From a program such as minicom, you tell the ROM to boot from serial, then upload the kernel via an XMODEM send. It loads up to 64KiB to bank 1 (the same location as the bootloader on the SD card would place it), then executes it.

This is an important option for testing, since it’s a fast way to get some code running while I don’t have an operating system, and writing to an SD card from a modern computer is not a fast process. It may also be an important fallback if I need to troubleshoot SD card routines.

Wrap-up

Previously, I needed to use a ROM programmer to load code onto this computer. I can now use an SD card or serial connection, and have a stable interface for the bootstrapping code to access some minimal services provided by the ROM.

It is also the first time I’m running code outside of bank 0, breaking through the 64 KiB limit of the classic 6502. There is an entire megabyte of RAM on this test board.

Of course, this computer still does nothing useful, but at least it now controlled by an SD card rather than flashing a ROM. On the hardware side of the project, this will help me to convert the design from 5 V to 3.3 V. I’ll need to convert the ROM to a PLCC-packaged flash chip for that, which is not something I’ll want to be programming frequently.

As far as software goes, my plan is to work on some more interesting demo programs, so that I can start to build a library of open source 65C816 code to work with. The hardware design, software and emulator for this computer can be found on GitHub, at mike42/65816-computer.

Let’s make a bootloader – Part 1

I’ve been working on a homebrew computer based on the 16-bit 65C816 CPU. All of my test programs so far have run from an EEPROM chip, which I need to remove and re-program each time I need to make a change.

Plenty of retro systems ran all of their programs from ROM, but I only want to use it for bootstrapping this computer. I’ve got 8 KiB of space for ROM-based programs in the memory map, which should be plenty to check the hardware and load software from disk.

In this two-part blog post, I’ll take a look at handing over control from the ROM to a program loaded from an SD card.

Technical background

I did some quick reading about the process for bootstrapping a PC during the 16-bit era. My homebrew computer is a completely different architecture to an IBM-compatible PC, but I’m planning to follow a few of the conventions from this ecosystem, since I’ll have some similar challenges.

The best resources on this topic are aimed at bootloader developers, such as this wikibooks page.

For a disk to be considered bootable, the first 512-byte sector needs to end with hex 0xAA55 (little-endian) . This is 01010101 10101010 in binary (a great test pattern!). My system is not x68-based, so I’ll store a different value there.

If a disk is bootable, then the BIOS will transfer the 512 byte boot sector to $7C00 and jump to it. The only assumption that the BIOS seems to make about the bootloader structure is that it starts with executable code. I’ll do the same on my system.

It’s worth noting that the first sector may also contain data structures for a filesystem or partitioning scheme, and it’s up to the bootloader code to work around that. For now, my SD card will contain only a bootloader, which does simplify things a bit.

Most bootloaders will then make a series of BIOS calls via software interrupts, which enables them produce text output or load additional data from disk. This is where I’ll have the biggest challenge, since my ROM has no stable interface for a bootloader to call.

Re-visiting SD card handling

My first task was to load the bootloader itself from SD card, storing the first 512 bytes from the disk to RAM, at address $7C00 onwards. This should be straightforward, since I have working 6502 assembly routines for reading from an SD card, and I’ve added a port for an SD card module to my 65C816 test board.

I came up with a routine which prints the contents of the boot sector, then prompts for whether to execute it. My ROM code is not checking the signature at this stage, and is not aware that the boot sector in this screen capture contains x86 machine code within a FAT32 boot sector, but this is a good start.

It took quite a few revisions to get this working, since my old 65C02 code for reading from SD produced strange output on this system. On my 65C816 test board, it showed almost the right values, but it was jumbled up, and mixed with SPI fill bytes ($FF). The below screen capture shows a diff between the expected and actual output of the ROM.

After a long process to rule out other programming and hardware errors, I finally noticed that I was writing the data starting from address $0104, which was never going to work. The default stack pointer on this CPU is $01ff and grows down, so writing 512 bytes to $0104 would always corrupt the stack after a few hundred bytes.

At this stage I was using the assembler to statically allocate a 512 byte space for IO. It appeared in code like this:

.segment "BSS"
io_block_id:              .res 4
io_buffer:                .res 512

The error was in the linker configuration, which I updated to start assigning RAM addresses from $0200 onwards.

 MEMORY {
     ZP:     start = $00,    size = $0100, type = rw, file = "";
-    RAM:    start = $0100,  size = $7e00, type = rw, file = "";
+    RAM:    start = $0200,  size = $7d00, type = rw, file = "";
     PRG:    start = $e000,  size = $2000, type = ro, file = %O, fill = yes, fillval = $00;
 }

The full SD card handling code is too long to post in this blog, but now allows any 512-byte segment from the first 32 MB of the SD card (identified by a 16-bit segment ID) to be loaded into an arbitrary memory address.

Making an API

My next challenge was to define an API for the bootloader to call into the ROM to perform I/O.

I considered using a jump table, but decided to use the cop instruction instead. This triggers a software interrupt on the 65C816, and has parallels to how the int instruction is used to trigger BIOS routines on x86 systems.

I defined a quick API for four basic routines, passing data via registers.

  • print char
  • read char
  • print string
  • load data from storage

The caller would need to set some registers, then call cop from assembly language. Any return data would also be passed via registers.

The cop instruction takes a one-byte operand, which in this case specifies the ID of the function to call.

cop $00

To prove that the interface would work, I implemented just the routine for printing strings.

; interrupt.s: Handling of software interrupts, the interface into the ROM for
; software (eg. bootloaders)
;
; Usage: Set registers and use 'cop' to trigger software interrupt.
; Eg:
;   ldx #'a'
;   cop ROM_PRINT_CHAR
; CPU should be in native mode with all registers 16-bit.

.import uart_printz, uart_print_char
.export cop_handler
.export ROM_PRINT_CHAR, ROM_READ_CHAR, ROM_PRINT_STRING, ROM_READ_DISK

; Routines available in ROM via software interrupts.
; Print one ASCII char.
;   A is char to print
ROM_PRINT_CHAR   := $00

; Read one ASCII char.
;   Returns typed character in A register
ROM_READ_CHAR    := $01

; Print a null-terminated ASCII string.
;   X is address of string, use data bank register for addresses outside bank 0.
ROM_PRINT_STRING := $02

; Read data from disk to RAM in 512 byte blocks.
;   X is address to write to, use data bank register for addresses outside bank 0.
;   A is low 2 bytes of block number
;   Y is number of blocks to read
ROM_READ_DISK    := $03

.segment "CODE"
; table of routines
cop_routines:
.word rom_print_char_handler
.word rom_read_char_hanlder
.word rom_print_string_handler
.word rom_read_disk_handler

cop_handler:
    .a16                            ; use 16-bit accumulator and index registers
    .i16
    rep #%00110000
    ; Save caller context to stack
    pha                             ; Push A, X, Y
    phx
    phy
    phb                             ; Push data bank, direct register
    phd
    ; Set up stack frame for COP handler
    tsc                             ; WIP set direct register to equal stack pointer
    sec
    sbc #cop_handler_local_vars_size
    tcs
    phd
    tcd
caller_k := 15
caller_ret := 13
caller_p := 12
caller_a := 10
caller_x := 8
caller_y := 6
caller_b := 5
caller_d := 3
cop_call_addr := 0
    ; set up 24 bit pointer to COP instruction
    ldx <frame_base+caller_ret
    dex
    dex
    stx <frame_base+cop_call_addr
    .a8                             ; Use 8-bit accumulator
    sep #%00100000
    lda <frame_base+caller_k
    sta <frame_base+cop_call_addr+2
    .a16                            ; Revert to 16-bit accumulator
    rep #%00100000

    ; load COP instruction which triggered this interrupt to figure out routine to run
    lda [<frame_base+cop_call_addr]
    xba                             ; interested only in second byte
    and #%00000011                  ; mask down to final two bits (there are only 4 valid functions at the moment)
    asl                             ; multiply by 2 to index into table of routines
    tax
    jsr (cop_routines, X)

    ; Remove stack frame for COP handler
    pld
    tsc
    clc
    adc #cop_handler_local_vars_size
    tcs

    ; Restore caller context from stack, reverse order
    pld                             ; Pull direct register, data bank
    plb
    ply                             ; Pull Y, X, A
    plx
    pla
    rti

cop_handler_local_vars_size := 3
frame_base := 1

rom_print_char_handler:
    ldx #aa
    jsr uart_printz
    rts

rom_read_char_hanlder:
    ldx #bb
    jsr uart_printz
    rts

rom_print_string_handler:
    ; Print string from X register
    ldx <frame_base+caller_x
    jsr uart_printz
    rts

rom_read_disk_handler:
    ldx #cc
    jsr uart_printz
    rts

aa: .asciiz "Not implemented A\r\n"
bb: .asciiz "Not implemented B\r\n"
cc: .asciiz "Not implemented C\r\n"

This snippet is quite dense, and uses several features which are new to the 65C816, not just the cop instruction.

I’m relocating the direct page to use as a stack frame, which is an idea I got from reading the output of the WDC 65C816 C compiler. Pointers are much easier to work with on the direct page.

This is the first snippet I’ve shared which uses a 24-bit pointer, via “direct page, indirect long” addressing. The pointer is used to load the instruction which triggered the interrupt, so that the code can figure out which function to call.

lda [<frame_base+cop_call_addr]

This snippet is also the first time I’ve used the jump to subroutine instruction (jsr) with the “absolute indirect, indexed with X” address mode. On the 65C02, I could only use this addressing mode on the jmp instruction. The only example of that on this blog is also an interrupt handling example.

jsr (cop_routines, X)

The “Hello World” of bootloaders

My next goal was to load a small program from disk, and show that it can call routines from the ROM. For now it is just a program on the boot sector on an SD card, which demonstrates that the new software interrupt API works.

This assembly file boot.s prints out two strings, so that I can be sure that the ROM is returning control back to the bootloader after a software interrupt completes.

ROM_PRINT_STRING := $02

.segment "CODE"
    .a16
    .i16
    ldx #test_string_1
    cop ROM_PRINT_STRING
    ldx #test_string_2
    cop ROM_PRINT_STRING
    stp

test_string_1: .asciiz "Test 1\r\n"
test_string_2: .asciiz "Test 2\r\n"

.segment "SIGNATURE"
    wdm $42                         ; Ensure x86 systems don't recognise this as bootable.

The linker configuration which goes with this is boot.cfg:

MEMORY {
    ZP:     start = $00,    size = $0100, type = rw, file = "";
    RAM:    start = $7e00,  size = $0200, type = rw, file = "";
    PRG:    start = $7c00,  size = $0200, type = rw, file = %O, fill = yes, fillval = $00;
}

SEGMENTS {
    ZEROPAGE:   load = ZP,  type = zp;
    BSS:        load = RAM, type = bss;
    CODE:       load = PRG, type = rw,  start = $7c00;
    SIGNATURE:  load = PRG, type = rw,  start = $7dfe;
}

The commands to assemble and link this are:

ca65 --feature string_escapes --cpu 65816 boot.s
ld65 -o boot.bin -C boot.cfg boot.o

This produces a 512 byte file, which I wrote to SD card.

This is the first time this computer is running code from RAM, which is an important milestone for this project.

Editor improvements

I needed to do some work on my 6502 assembly plugin for IntelliJ during this process, since it didn’t understand the square brackets used for the long address modes.

    lda [<frame_base+cop_call_addr]

While I was fixing this, I also implemented an auto-format feature. This saves me the manual effort of lining up all the comments in a column, as is typical in assembly code.

Lastly, I added support for jumping to unnamed labels, which are a ca65-specific feature.

Next steps

In the second half of this blog post, I’ll get the bootloader to load a larger program from the SD card. I’m hoping to allow the bootloader to control how much code to load, and where to load it from.

Building a simple power supply module

I recently put together a tiny module to power my electronics projects. This is a 3cm x 4cm circuit board, and can be assembled to deliver either a fixed 3.3V or 5V output.

Background: Breadboard power supplies

I start a lot of my projects on a breadboard, and previously used a breadboard power supply. The voltage regulators on these are not particularly resilient, and I’ve damaged two of them by wiring something up incorrectly and drawing too much current.

They do not exactly fail-safe, and now pass through the input voltage to whatever I’m working on. This is 12 V in my case, which is enough to fry most of the components I work with.

A bit of searching shows that this is a common issue. The first power supply which did this was a Bud Industries BBP-32701, which uses an LM1117 regulator.

The second one was a DFRobot DFR0140, which uses the AMS1117 regulator.

For the past year or so, I’ve used an L7805 regulator connected to a breadboard instead. This is not particularly efficient, but it works well, and I’ve caused enough short circuits to know that the over-current protection works.

Converting to a PCB

My only goal was to take the exact parts I’ve already got, and make them into a more compact module for permanent use.

I used KiCad to capture the schematic and design the board. The minimum order is generally 5 circuit boards, so I planned to assemble some with an L7805 (5 V), and others with a LD33V (3.3 V) regulator. These have different pin-outs, so I added a series of solder jumpers so that I can use the same board for either regulator.

Layout for this PCB was straightforward. It’s a two-layer board, and I added a ground pour on the bottom layer, and the output voltage on most of the top layer.

I also decided to switch off thermal relief on the copper pours, to see if a direct connection to a ground plane really makes soldering more difficult (it does! lesson learned).

I tried to make this board quite dense, but didn’t go completely overboard: It’s useful to have holes to install standoffs, plus a small area to write on, so that I can distinguish the 5 V and 3.3 V modules later.

Wrap-up

I’m still a little surprised that custom PCB’s are so accessible for hobby use. The unit price of these boards was just 1.36 AUD before shipping, which is cost-competitive with blank prototyping board.

It’s easy to get assembled DC-DC converters, so I don’t suggest building any of these modules yourself. However, as with many of the things I blog about, I’ve uploaded the project files to GitHub under an open source license. The KiCad project, Gerber files and parts list for this project can be found at mike42/simple-power-supply.

Let’s implement power-on self test (POST)

I recently implemented simple Power-on self test (POST) routine for my 65C816 test board, so that it can stop and indicate a hardware failure before attempting to run any normal code.

This was an interesting adventure for two main reasons:

  • This code needs to work with no RAM present in the computer.
  • I wanted to try re-purposing the emulation status (E) output on the 65C816 CPU to blink an LED.

Background

Even modern computers will stop and provide a blinking light or series of beeps if you don’t install RAM or a video card. This is implemented in the BIOS or UEFI.

I got the idea to use the E or MX CPU outputs for this purpose from this thread on the 6502.org forums. This method would allow me to blink a light with just a CPU, clock input, and ROM working.

My main goal is to perform a quick test that each device is present, so that start-up fails in a predictable way if I’ve connected something incorrectly. This is much simpler than the POST routine from a real BIOS, because I’m not doing device detection, and I’m not testing every byte of memory.

Boot-up process

On my test board, I’ve connected an LED directly to the emulation status (E) output on the 65C816 CPU. The CPU starts in emulation mode (E is high). However I have noticed that on power-up, the value of E appears to be random until /RES goes high. If I were wiring this up again, I would also prevent the LED from lighting up while the CPU is in reset:

The first thing the CPU does is read an address from ROM, called the reset vector, which tells it where start executing code.

In my case, the first two instructions set the CPU to native mode, which are clc (clear carry) and xce (exchange carry with emulation).

.segment "CODE"
reset:
    .a8
    .i8
    clc                            ; switch to native mode
    xce
    jmp post_check_loram

By default accumulator and index registers are 8-bit, the .a8 and .i8 directives simply tell the assembler ca65 that this is the case.

Next, the code will jmp to the start of the POST process.

Checking low RAM

The first part of the POST procedure checks if the lower part of RAM is available, by writing values to two address and checking that the same values can be read back.

Note that a:$00 causes the assembler to interpret $00 as an absolute address. This will otherwise be interpreted as direct-page address, which is not what’s intended here.

post_check_loram:
    ldx #%01010101                 ; Power-on self test (POST) - do we have low RAM?
    ldy #%10101010
    stx a:$00                      ; store known values at two addresses
    sty a:$01
    ldx a:$00                      ; read back the values - unlikely to be correct if RAM not present
    ldy a:$01
    cpx #%01010101
    bne post_fail_loram
    cpy #%10101010
    bne post_fail_loram
    jmp post_check_hiram

If this fails, then the boot process stops, and the emulation LED blinks in a distinctive pattern (two blinks) forever.

post_fail_loram:                   ; blink emulation mode output with two pulses
    pause 8
    blink
    blink
    jmp post_fail_loram            ; repeat indefinitely

Macros: pause and blink

It’s a mini-challenge to write code to blink an LED in a distinctive pattern without assuming that RAM works. This means no stack operations (eg. jsr and rts instructions), and that I need to store anything I need in 3 bytes: the A, X, Y registers. A triple-nested loop is the best I can come up with.

I wrote a pause macro, which runs a time-wasting loop for the requested duration – approximately a multiple of 100ms at this clock speed. Every time this macro is used, the len value is substituted in, and this code is included in the source file. This example also uses unnamed labels, which is a ca65 feature for writing messy code.

.macro pause len                   ; time-wasting loop as macro
    lda #len
:
    ldx #64
:
    ldy #255
:
    dey
    cpy #0
    bne :-
    dex
    cpx #0
    bne :--
    dec
    cmp #0
    bne :---
.endmacro

The second macro I wrote is blink, which briefly lights up the LED attached to the E output by toggling emulation mode. I’m using the pause macro from both native mode and emulation mode in this snippet, so I can only treat A, X and Y as 8-bit registers.

.macro blink
    sec                            ; switch to emulation mode
    xce
    pause 1
    clc                            ; switch to native mode
    xce
    pause 2
    sec                            ; switch to emulation mode
.endmacro

Checking high RAM

There is also a second RAM chip, and this process is repeated with some differences. For one, I can now use the stack, which is how I set the data bank byte in this snippet.

Here a:$01 is important, because with direct page addressing, $01 means $000001 at this point in the code, where I want to test that I can write to the memory address $080001.

post_check_hiram:
    ldx #%10101010                 ; Power-on self test (POST) - do we have high RAM?
    ldy #%01010101
    lda #$08                       ; data bank to high ram
    pha
    plb
    stx a:$00                      ; store known values at two addresses
    sty a:$01
    ldx a:$00                      ; read back the values - unlikely to be correct if RAM not present
    ldy a:$01
    cpx #%10101010
    bne post_fail_hiram
    cpy #%01010101
    bne post_fail_hiram
    lda #$00                       ; reset data bank to boot-up value
    pha
    plb
    jmp post_check_via

The failure here is similar, but the LED will blink 3 times instead of 2.

post_fail_hiram:                   ; blink emulation mode output with three pulses. we could use RAM here?
    pause 8
    blink
    blink
    blink
    jmp post_fail_hiram            ; repeat indefinitely

To make sure that I was writing to different chips, I installed the RAM chips one at a time, first observing the expected failures, and then observing that the code continued past this point with the chip installed.

I also checked with an oscilloscope that both RAM chips are now being accessed during start-up. Now that I’ve got some confidence that the computer now requires both chips to start, I can skip a few debugging steps if I’ve got code that isn’t working later.

Checking the Versatile Interface Adapter (VIA)

The third chip I wanted to add to the POST process is the 65C22 VIA. I kept this check simple, because one read to check for a start-up default is sufficient to test for device presence.

VIA_IER = $c00e
post_check_via:                    ; Power-on self test (POST) - do we have a 65C22 Versatile Interface Adapter (VIA)?
    lda a:VIA_IER
    cmp #%10000000                 ; start-up state, interrupts enabled overall (IFR7) but all interrupt sources (IFR0-6) disabled.
    bne post_fail_via
    jmp post_ok

This stops and blinks 4 times if it fails. I recorded the GIF at the top of this blog post by removing the component which generates a chip-select for the VIA, which causes this code to trigger on boot.

post_fail_via:
    pause 8
    blink
    blink
    blink
    blink
    jmp post_fail_via

Beep for good measure

At the end of the POST process, I put in some code to generate a short beep.

This uses the fact that the 65C22 can toggle the PB7 output each time a certain number of clock-cycles pass. I’ve connected a piezo buzzer to that output, which I’m using as a PC speaker. The 65C22 is serving the role of a programmable interrupt timer from the PC world.

VIA_DDRB = $c002
VIA_T1C_L = $c004
VIA_T1C_H = $c005
VIA_ACR = $c00b
BEEP_FREQ_DIVIDER = 461            ; 1KHz, formula is CPU clock / (desired frequency * 2), or 921600 / (1000 * 2) ~= 461
post_ok:                           ; all good, emit celebratory beep, approx 1KHz for 1/10th second
    ; Start beep
    lda #%10000000                 ; VIA PIN PB7 only
    sta VIA_DDRB
    lda #%11000000                 ; set ACR. first two bits = 11 is continuous square wave output on PB7
    sta VIA_ACR
    lda #<BEEP_FREQ_DIVIDER        ; set T1 low-order counter
    sta VIA_T1C_L
    lda #>BEEP_FREQ_DIVIDER        ; set T1 high-order counter
    sta VIA_T1C_H
    ; wait approx 0.1 seconds
    pause 1
    ; Stop beep
    lda #%11000000                 ; set ACR. returns to a one-shot mode
    sta VIA_ACR
    stz VIA_T1C_L                  ; zero the counters
    stz VIA_T1C_H
    ; POST is now done
    jmp post_done

The post_done label points to the start of the old ROM code, which is currently just a “hello world” program.

Next steps

I’m now able to lock in some of my assumptions about should be available in software, so that I can write more complex programs without second-guessing the hardware.

Once the boot ROM is interacting with more hardware, I may add additional checks. I will probably need to split this into different sections, and make use of jsr/rts once RAM has been tested, because the macros are currently generating a huge amount of machine code. I have 8KiB of ROM in the memory map for this computer, and the code on this page tales up around 1.1KiB.

Building a 65C816 test board

In the last few months, I’ve been learning about the 65C816 processor, and trying to build a working computer which uses it. My latest breadboard-based prototype was not reliable, and I decided to convert it to a PCB to hopefully eliminate the problem, or to at least identify it.

Quick goals

I was aiming to make a debug-friendly 4-layer PCB, the size of two standard breadboards. This will be my first time designing a 4-layer board, and also my first time using KiCad 6 to create a PCB.

I didn’t have a working prototype, so I built in test points for connecting an oscilloscope or logic analyser to troubleshoot. In case of errors, I made it possible to leave some components unpopulated, and instead drive signals externally.

I also left some extra footprints which I might use for future improvements, or can fall back to if some of my ideas don’t work out.

The clock

Some components require the inverse of the CPU clock, and there was previously a small delay from inverting the signal. I don’t think this is a problem on its own, but I introduced a D-type flip-flop to create a proper two-phase clock.

This does halve the CPU clock speed, so I added jumpers to allow an alternative clock source to be selected for the CPU, where previously the UART and CPU clocks needed to be the same. Note that there is an error in the wiring here, which I only discovered later.

The oscillator I’m using on the breadboard prototype is a DIP-8 package. A larger variety of oscillators are available as a 5x7mm QFN package, where the four corner pins have the same function as the DIP-8 version. I added an alternative footprint, which fits without taking up any extra board space. I expect that I’ll only use this if I attempt to run the board at 3.3V later.

Some 6-pin QFN oscillators provide an inverted clock output on one of the pins, and it would be an idea to use one of those in a future design to reduce the component count.

New reset controller

Several components on the board require a reset input. These are mostly active-low inputs, but one component has an active-high reset. I discovered the tiny MIC2775 supervisory IC, which provides both.

I haven’t used this part before, so in case of problems, I also made it possible to remove this part and use a DS1813, which generates an active-low reset on my prototype.

These parts work by sensing voltage, and drop-in alternatives exist for either part if I move to 3.3V.

ROM

I am currently using a parallel EEPROM to store code for my prototype, and will add this to the PCB for this test board. As with the the clock and reset controller, I’m working with 5V components today, but considering what I would need to change to run the whole board at 3.3V.

The few EEPROMs which are available at 3.3V use a different package, and are quite slow (200ns or worse). Parallel flash chips seem to be the most promising alternative, since they have a similar interface, although I haven’t confirmed that I can program them yet. I added a footprint for the SST39LF010, which also has a 5V variant with the same pin-out.

Other footprints

I also added footprints so that I could connect the SD card module which I used on my 6502 computer, a piezo buzzer, and some electrolytic capacitors if needed.

Design lessons learned

Although my first attempt at making a PCB was a success, I learned a few things which I’m using here.

For that previous project, I found that machined-pin sockets are not very tolerant of used chips with bent legs, so I’ve used cheaper stamped pin sockets for this test board. I’ve also left spacing at the ends of each socketed IC, so that they can be pulled out more easily.

I made an effort to keep unrelated traces away from points which I need to solder, because I had some problems with this on my last board.

I also avoided creating one large expansion header, and instead exposed signals in places which are easy to route. For example, the I/O device select signals are exposed on a pin header right beside the chip which generates them.

PCB layout

The standard process is to make a schematic, then proceed to placing components, then routing traces.

For this test board, I instead chose the physical dimensions of the board first, and added components incrementally (particularly test points, expansion headers and alternative footprints) until I was making good use of the available space. KiCad has an item in the “Tools” menu to “Update PCB from Schematic”, which I used extensively.

Just to see how it would look, I also added the letters “65C816” to the back copper layer, which is visible in the top-right here.

I put a lot of time into labeling different parts of the board to help with debug/assembly, and used the 3D view to check that it wasn’t too crowded.

Before sending the files to a manufacturer, I printed it at 1:1 scale for a reality check.

Among other things, this confirmed that the ROM sockets had enough clearance from other components.

It also confirmed that either DIP-8 or QFN-packaged oscillators would fit.

Assembly

I ordered the boards from a manufacturer which I’ve used before. They are large-ish, lead-free 4-layer boards, but I’m not optimising for cost. I’ve left a lot of options in the board, so I’m hoping to make use of several of these PCBs in different configurations, depending on which direction this project goes.

I assembled the board incrementally, starting with the power LED. Most of the passive components on this board are 0603 (imperial) size surface-mount parts, and I’ve used footprints with long pads for hand soldering.

The first problem I found was with the reset button – I had switched to using a footprint with the correct pin spacing, but had assigned the pins incorrectly, so I needed to cut/bend some legs and install it rotated 90 degrees.

I next found a problem with the clock, where I had wired up the flip-flop incorrectly in the schematic – the /Q output should go to D. I could recover from this by cutting a trace and running a short wire. Of course the board is mirrored when flipped upside-down, so I cut the wrong trace first and needed to repair that too.

I added enough components to get the CPU to run NOP instructions from ROM, then built up to a running some test programs which I’ve blogged about here. The final mistake I discovered was a mix-up with some of the lines used for selecting I/O devices, which means that devices are not mapped to their intended addresses. I can work around this in software.

This is already an improvement over the breadboard prototype, because I can quickly swap the ROM chip without accidentally disconnecting anything.

The board looked fairly complete at this point, and the only major component missing was the UART chip. This was the part which did not work reliably in my prototype, so I was prepared to do some debugging here. Note that I’ve got orange test points all over the board to connect important signals to an oscilloscope, with a few black test points for GND connections. All of the 74-series chips are in the 74AC logic family, and I sourced 74HC versions as well in case I needed to switch any to see the difference.

However, I was able to run more or less the same test program I used before, and it now works reliably. This is captured through a Cypress FX2-based logic analyser using Sigrok.

It’s great that this works, but I don’t know for sure why this was so unreliable on my previous prototype. Several possible causes were eliminated through this process, since I used a new UART chip and freshly programmed address decode PLD, and eliminated a possible timing issue. On a PCB, I’m also able to make better electrical connections, and add a ground plane, which is an immediate advantage over breadboards.

The design as it stands

Now that I am back to having a working prototype, I’ll take this chance to post some updated schematics.

Just a note of caution: this is snapshot of a work-in-progress learning project. I’m absolutely aware that there are errors in here, and that the layout is quite messy. Still, I hope that this is useful to anybody else who is attempting to use this relatively obscure CPU.

The design no longer fits on one page, so I’ve split it into 3 sheets.

CPU

The CPU sheet contains the circuitry for de-multiplexing the data bus and bank address byte. All power, reset, and clock components are in here as well, along with pin headers for the address & data bus, and all those test points.

There are a lot of “just in case” components as well, such as pull-up resistors on the data bus, which I have not fitted.

Memory

The memory section is quite straightforward. I’ve got a PLD generating chip-selects for ROM, RAM0, or RAM1, with some extra components to add some flexibility.

I/O

In case I/O is selected, there are three possible choices: the 65C22 VIA, or one of the two UART interfaces. Most of the other components on this sheet are optional footprints or external ports. Note that the clock going into the UART is mis-labelled on this sheet.

Next steps

I’m going to spend some time using this board as a development platform for low-level software which targets the 65C816 CPU. I’ll most likely also use the emulator which I put together a few weeks ago to speed up development, since I’ve been able to confirm that the code I’m writing works on real hardware.

The basic functionality is now a lot more stable than what I had before, so this test board will allow me to prototype some different hardware options once I’ve got some simple text-based programs up and running.

The hardware design, software and emulator for this computer can be found in the GitHub repository for this project. I’m updating the repository as I make progress with this project, and the version used for this blog post is here.

65C816 computer – second prototype

Back in February, I blogged about my 65816 computer prototype on breadboards. I recently spent some time re-building this in an attempt to add some improvements.

The new prototype didn’t work particularly well, so I’ve left out quite a lot of detail from this update.

Power delivery

I soldered stranded wire to pin-headers to deliver a reliable ground and +5V power connection to each breadboard. This corrected some problems from my previous prototype, which used a long chain of unreliable connections.

Adding more RAM

I added a second 512 KiB RAM chip, and extended the address decoding scheme to provide a chip-select signal for it. The computer now uses the planned 20-bit address bus, though the wiring around these chips became very dense.

Adding a UART chip

I previously tested an NXP SC16C752 UART, and added it to this computer to provide text I/O. This is a small surface-mount chip, which I am connecting via a break-out board.

My previous prototype only supported one I/O device, so I also extended the address decoding scheme with a 74AC138 decoder.

Problems

I could get some simple test programs running, but text I/O did not work reliably at all. With my limited debugging tools (just a logic analyser), I was only able to conclude that data being written by the CPU was different to what was being received by the UART.

This seemed like it could be a timing or signal integrity issue, but I couldn’t be certain from looking at digital output with a low sample-rate. This image shows some control signals from when I was troubleshooting this.

Next steps

After hitting a dead-end, I made a list of possible causes, and decided to re-build this prototype on a debug-friendly PCB, and to source an oscilloscope for troubleshooting.

More on that in my next post!

Building an emulator for my 65C816 computer

I’ve been working on adding text-based input and output to my 65C816 computer prototype, but it’s not yet working reliably.

To unblock software development, I decided to put together an emulator, so that I can test my code while the hardware is out of action.

Choosing a base project

There were three main options I considered for running 65C816 programs on a modern computer,

  1. Write a new emulator from scratch
  2. Extract the useful parts of an open source Super Nintendo or Apple IIgs emulator and adapt them
  3. Find a 65C816 CPU emulator, and extend it.

I found a good candidate for the third option in Lib65816 by Francesco Rigoni, which is a C++ library for emulating a 65C816 CPU. The code is GPLv3 licensed, and I could see where I would need to make changes to match the design of my computer.

Process

After reading the code, I could see some places where I would need to modify the library, so I copied it in to a new folder, together with its logging dependency and sample program, and refactored it into one project.

I started by extending RAM up to 16 banks (1 megabyte), and mapping in a ROM device which serves bytes from a file. I also updated the handling of interrupt vectors, so that the CPU would retrieve them from the system bus.

Adding 65C22 support

My first test program was an example of preemptive multi-tasking from my previous blog post. At this point it ran, but did not switch between tasks, since that requires extra hardware support.

I implemented a minimal support for the 65C22 VIA used in my computer design, just enough to log changes to the outputs, and to fire interrupts from a timer.

The Lib65816 library does not support NMI interrupts, which are used in this test program. I added edge detection, and connected the interrupt output of the 65C22 to the CPU NMI input in code.

This screen capture shows the test program during switching between two tasks, with a different VIA port being accessed before and after the switch.

This gave me some confidence that the CPU emulation was good enough to develop on, so I moved on to the next test program.

Adding serial support

The second test program is also from an earlier blog post, and tests printing and reading characters from an NXP SC16C752 UART.

I added a very minimal emulation of the UART chip I’m using, suppressed all of the logging, and converted output to use the curses library. This last step enabled character-by-character I/O, instead of the default line-buffered I/O.

This screen capture shows the program running under emulation. It simply prints “Hello world”, then echoes back the next 3 characters that the user types.

Wrap-up

I didn’t plan to write an emulator for my custom computer, but I am currently debugging some tricky hardware problems, and this detour will allow me to continue to make progress in other areas while I try to find a solution.

I plan to keep the emulator up to date with hardware changes, since it will make it possible to demonstrate the system without any hardware access. It’s also easier to debug issues now that I can choose two different execution environments.

The hardware design, software and emulator for this computer are online at mike42/65816-computer. I would like to again acknowledge Francesco Rigoni’s work on Lib65816. I’m very grateful that he chose to release this under the GPL, since it allows me to re-use the code for my project.

Let’s implement preemptive multitasking

I am currently working on building a computer based on the 65C816 processor. This processor has a 16-bit stack pointer, which should make it far more capable than the earlier 65C02, at least in theory.

I wanted to check my understanding of how the stack works on this processor, so I tried to build the simplest possible implementation of preemptive multitasking in 65C816 assembly.

What I’m working with

I am working with a breadboard computer. It has no operating system, and no ability to load programs or start/stop processes.

To get code running, I am assembling it on a modern computer, then writing the resulting binary to an EEPROM chip.

To see the result of the code, I am using a logic analyser to watch some output pins on the 65C22 VIA. The 65C22 chip also has a timer, so I connected its interrupt output to the NMI input of the CPU for this test.

Test programs

I wrote two simple programs which infinitely loop. These programs use ca65 assembler syntax.

The 65C22 has two 8-bit ports, so I made each test program write a recognisable pattern to its own output port, so that it’s easy to see which one is running at any given time, and check that it is not disrupted by the task switching.

The first program writes to Port A of the 65C22, and alternates the value between 0000 0000, and 0000 0011.

.segment "CODE"
; Task 1
task_1_main:
  .a8                             ; use 8-bit accumulator and index registers
  .i8
  sep #%00110000
@repeat_1:
  lda #%00000000                  ; alternate between two values
  sta PORTA
  lda #%00000011
  sta PORTA
  jmp @repeat_1                   ; repeat forever

The second program writes to Port B of the 65C22. This uses a ror instruction to produce a pattern across all digits of the output port.

.segment "CODE"
; Task 2
task_2_main:
  .a8                             ; use 8-bit accumulator and index registers
  .i8
  sep #%00110000
  clc
  lda #%01010101                  ; grab a start value
@repeat_2:
  ror                             ; rotate right
  sta PORTB
  jmp @repeat_2                   ; repeat forever

Context switching

I’m implementing round-robin scheduling between two processes.

My basic plan was to use a regular interrupt routine to save context, switch the stack pointer to the other process, restore context for the next process, then return from the interrupt.

.segment "CODE"
nmi:
  .a16
  .i16
  rep #%00110000
  ; Save task context to stack
  pha                             ; Push A, X, Y
  phx
  phy
  phb                             ; Push data bank, direct register
  phd

  ; swap stack pointer so that we will restore the other task
  tsc                             ; transfer current stack pointer to memory
  sta temp
  lda next_task_sp                ; load next stack pointer from memory
  tcs
  lda temp                        ; previous task is up next
  sta next_task_sp

  ; Clear interrut
  .a8
  .i8
  sep #%00110000                  ; save X only (assumes it is 8 bits..)
  ldx T1C_L                       ; Clear the interrupt, side-effect of reading

  .a16
  .i16
  rep #%00110000
  ; Restore process context from stack, reverse order
  pld                             ; Pull direct register, data bank
  plb
  ply                             ; Pull Y, X, A
  plx
  pla
  rti

Setup process

The above switch works while the two processes are up and running, that takes some setting up. Firstly, the two variables need to be referenced somewhere.

.segment "BSS"
next_task_sp: .res 2              ; Stack pointer of whichever task is not currently running
temp: .res 2

The boot-up routine then sets everything up. It’s broken up a bit here. First is the CPU initialisation, since the 65C816 will boot to emulation mode.

.segment "CODE"
reset:
  clc                             ; switch to native mode
  xce

The second step is to start a task in the background. This involves pushing appropriate values to the stack, so that when we context switch, “Task 2” will start executing from the top.

  ; Save context as if we are at task_2_main, so we can switch to it later.
  .a16                            ; use 16-bit accumulator and index registers
  .i16
  rep #%00110000
  lda #$3000                      ; set up stack, direct page at $3000
  tcs
  tcd
  ; emulate what is pushed to the stack before NMI is called: program bank, program counter, processor status register
  phk                             ; program bank register, same as current code, will be 0 here.
  pea task_2_main                 ; 16 bit program counter for the start of this task
  php                             ; processor status register
  ; match what we push to the stack in the nmi routine
  lda #0
  tax
  tay
  pha                             ; Push A, X, Y
  phx
  phy
  phb                             ; Push data bank, direct register
  phd
  tsc                             ; save stack pointer to next_task_sp
  sta next_task_sp

  lda #$2000                      ; set up stack, direct page at $2000 for task_1_main
  tcs
  tcd

The nex step is to set up a timer, so that the interrupt routine will fire regularly. This causes interrupts to occur ~28 times per second.

  ; Set up the interrupt timer
  .a8                             ; use 8-bit accumulator and index registers
  .i8
  sep #%00110000
  lda #%11111111                  ; set all VIA pins to output
  sta DDRA
  sta DDRB
  ; set up timer 1
  lda #%01000000                  ; set ACR. first two bits = 01 is continuous interrupts for T1
  sta ACR
  lda #%11000000                  ; enable VIA interrupt for T1
  sta IER
  ; set up a timer at ~65535 clock pulses.
  lda #$ff                        ; set T1 low-order counter
  sta T1C_L
  lda #$ff                        ; set T1 high-order counter
  sta T1C_H

Finally, “Task 1” can be started in the foreground.

  ; start running task 1
  jmp task_1_main

Linker configuration and boilerplate

This is the first time I’m blogging about code written in 65C816 native mode, so for the sake of completeness, I’ll also include the updated linker configuration. The most important change (compared with this blog post) to that 32 bytes are now set aside for interrupt vectors.

MEMORY {
    ZP:     start = $00,    size = $0100, type = rw, file = "";
    RAM:    start = $0100,  size = $7e00, type = rw, file = "";
    PRG:    start = $e000,  size = $2000, type = ro, file = %O, fill = yes, fillval = $00;
}

SEGMENTS {
    ZEROPAGE: load = ZP,  type = zp;
    BSS:      load = RAM, type = bss;
    CODE:     load = PRG, type = ro,  start = $e000;
    VECTORS:  load = PRG, type = ro,  start = $ffe0;
}

Note that this linker configuration is not quite complete, but it is good enough to get code running. The zero page is not relevant for the code I’ll be writing, so I might remove that at some point.

I also have definitions for the 65C22 I/O registers, which correspond to the location that it is mapped into RAM on my prototype computer.

PORTB = $c000
PORTA = $c001
DDRB = $c002
DDRA = $c003
T1C_L = $c004
T1C_H = $c005
ACR = $c00b
IFR = $c00b
IER = $c00e

The final piece of the puzzle then, are definitions for all those interrupt vectors.

.segment "CODE"
irq:
  rti

unused_interrupt:                 ; Probably make this into a crash.
  rti

.segment "VECTORS"
; native mode interrupt vectors
.word unused_interrupt            ; Reserved
.word unused_interrupt            ; Reserved
.word unused_interrupt            ; COP
.word unused_interrupt            ; BRK
.word unused_interrupt            ; Abort
.word nmi                         ; NMI
.word unused_interrupt            ; Reserved
.word irq                         ; IRQ

; emulation mode interrupt vectors
.word unused_interrupt            ; Reserved
.word unused_interrupt            ; Reserved
.word unused_interrupt            ; COP
.word unused_interrupt            ; Reserved
.word unused_interrupt            ; Abort
.word unused_interrupt            ; NMI
.word reset                       ; Reset
.word unused_interrupt            ; IRQ/BRK

The process for building this assembly code into a usable ROM are:

ca65 --cpu 65816 main.s
ld65 -o rom.bin -C system.cfg main.o

This outputs an 8KiB file. I need to pad this with zeroes up to 32KiB, which is the size of the ROM chip I am burning it to.

truncate -s 32768 rom.bin

Lastly, I write this to the ROM.

minipro -p AT28C256 -w rom.bin

Result

I connected a logic analyser to two wires from each output port, the NMI interrupt line, and the reset signal, and opened up sigrok.

This clearly shows the CPU switching between the two processes each time an interrupt is triggered.

Zooming in on the task cut-over, I can also see that the patterns on each port are different, as expected.

Of course this did not work the first time, and I spent quite a bit of time de-constructing and re-constructing the code to isolate bugs.

As result, I shipped some improvements to my 6502 assembly plugin for JetBrains IDE’s, which I have blogged about previously. The plugin will now provide suggestions for mnemonics. There is a project setting for 6502 vs 65C02 vs 65C816 mode, and it will only suggest mnemonics which are available for the CPU.

It also provides a weak warning for binary or hex numbers which are not 8, 16 or 24 bits, which would have saved me some time.

Lastly, it has optional checking for undefined/unused values. This helps catch problems in the editor, and allows me to identify unused code and variables.

Wrap-up

I already knew how multitasking works on a high-level, but it was quite interesting to implement it myself. I have been using this as a test program for my 65C816 computer, since it exercises RAM, ROM, I/O, and uses interrupts.

I don’t think I will be able to use this exact method for more complex programs, because it will break down a bit with multiple interrupt sources. After writing this code, I also found that it’s not common for modern systems to save register values to the stack when context-switching, and that a process control block is used instead.

The next step for my 65C816 computer will be the addition of an NXP UART, which I tested in an earlier blog post.