JimDrew wrote:
By the way, when I attended the Microchip Masters conference I was told that I should be sampling some new 100MIPS PIC24 parts soon, and they will have a few with 64K and 128K of RAM. These are suppose to be fully pin compatible with existing 64 and 100 pin packages.
Interesting. I hadn't seen any information about faster PIC24 devices. With 128K you could easily put the emulator and some kind of video generation in a single chip. Its a shame Microchip have not yet put the graphics module in any of the faster chips.
I've been looking at the PIC32MX chips as an alternative platform for the emulators. I've rewritten the code for a PIC32MX795F512H in pure MIPS assembly but its not quite finished. I was distracted by writing 8080, Z80, 6800 and 65C816 emulators for the same device. I haven't quite reached the point of being able to determine how fast they will go on the 80MIP MX device and I'm waiting for the 200MIPS MZ devices to be released next year - a 14Mhz+ 65C816 with 512K of RAM on a single chip looks possible. The problem with these emulation projects is they spawn sub-projects: boot ROMs to code, assemblers to the written, micro SD card partitioning for virtual CP/M disks. And then there are my HackSpace projects (
http://rlab.org.uk/wiki/Projects/CheeseBoard). I even have to find the time to do some paying work.
I must release the latest version of the 65C02 chip for the 24EP512GP202 which ups the emulator RAM to 32K and includes a slight emulation speed enhancement but I want to try it on real chip first, just haven't had the time yet.