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For those interested in hacking in this: The Pano G2 FPGA is a monster, but prices on eBay have gone up a lot. My cheapest buy was 25 of them for $85 (includin
by tverbeure 7y ago
For those interested in hacking in this:
The Pano G2 FPGA is a monster, but prices on eBay have gone up a lot. My cheapest buy was 25 of them for $85 (including shipping!). They now go for around 1 for $30 if you’re lucky... or $200+ for many.
The Pano G1 (with VGA instead of DVI) is cheaper but has a much smaller FPGA, though still large by hobby standards.
The benefit of the G1 is that all interfaces are working now, including DRAM, USB, Ethernet.
Last week, Skip Hansen got a full CP/M system running on one: https://github.com/skiphansen/pano_z80 https://github.com/skiphansen/pano_z80
USB on the G2 is hard. A bunch of people have tried and failed.
- tpmx 7y agoSo, Rev C is G2 [Edit: nope]. What's the cutoff between G1/G2? Is "Rev B" G1 or G2? (Granted, I mostly see Rev C.)
- tverbeure 7y agoThe revs that are posted on eBay are useless, even though that’s what’s advertised. Rev C is usually G1, rev B usually G2. But not always. ;-) The only reliable indicator to check which one to buy is looking at the pictures: VGA is G1, DVI is G2. (Some G2 are photographed with a DVI to VGA dongle plugged in, adding to the confusion.) There are 2 G2 versions: one with an LX100 and one with LX150. You can’t know which one you’re buying... LX100 is still a gigantic FPGA for hobby stuff.
- tpmx 7y agoAh. Most of the devices on sale on ebay have VGA connectors. Found one with DVI and just bought it, @ $22.95. Thanks for the advice!
- tverbeure 7y agoThat’s an excellent price. Have fun with it!
- archi42 7y agoI just want to second this! I think I just ordered a LX100 for that price (plus 25US$ for shipping to ol' Europe). //edit: Next thing tomorrow: Order the stuff necessary to program this (or check if I can use company equipment).
- tverbeure 7y agoThere are different options: my preferred one is to use something like this: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32940620936.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32940620936.html If you're willing to forgo the Xilinx special features such as ChipScope, you can also use OpenOCD and pretty much any OpenOCD compatible JTAG cable to upload a bitstream into the FPGA.
- Annatar 7y agoI never was a fan of the Zilog Z80 (its instruction set reminded me too much of the idiotic intel 80x86 family), but seeing someone running the Control Program for Microcomputers on a whopping 25 MHz Z80 is incredibly cool... just imagine what kind of scene demos could be coded on this monster for the next demo party... I wonder if it would be possible to retrofit an MMU onto a Z80 design and port a real UNIX to it? 25 or even 50 or even a 75 MHz UNIX server on a Z80 processor, that'd be a nice perversion...
- okl 7y agoThis guy ran Linux on an ARM emulator on an ATmega. A similar feat should be possible on a Z80. http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=07.%20Linux%20on%208bit http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=07.%20Linux%20on%208bit
- Annatar 7y agoI remember that. That was emulation and it was not usable the way a 75 MHz Z80 could be, running code directly on the CPU (even if it is an FPGA).
- tasty_freeze 7y ago> [the Z80's] instruction set reminded me too much of the idiotic intel 80x86 family That is because the z80 was a (mostly) binary compatible superset of the 8080 instruction set, and the 8086 (while not binary compatible) was intentionally modeled after the 8080 such that there was a program that could take an 8080 program and do the 1:1 instruction mapping from 8080 to 8086 and get a working 8086 program. > I wonder if it would be possible to retrofit an MMU onto a Z80 design Zilog made a number of Z80 follow-on CPUs, and some have MMUs. It is amazing how far they took the instruction set; the Z80380 could run Z80 code as-is, but it also extended instructions to support 32b operations and had a mode with a flat 32b linear address space. I don't recall ever hearing any consumer product using it though.
- qubex 7y agoZ80380 user’s manual, for those interested: https://www.manualslib.com/manual/1237352/Zilog-Z80380.html https://www.manualslib.com/manual/1237352/Zilog-Z80380.html
- ttsiodras 7y agoOP here - just a note, that "tverbeure" is the Tom I mention in my blog post. None of this would have been possible without you, Tom! Thanks for everything.
- ChuckMcM 7y agoWell you two owe me $32 :-). Kidding of course but the G2 looks like a cool gizmo and so I got one. I'm wondering if my Scarab code for the LX6+ will move over.
- Cyph0n 7y agoI’m confused. I did a bit of Googling, and it appears that Pano Logic used Xilinx FPGAs. I’m guessing the Pano G1/G2 contains a board that the Xilinx FPGA is housed on? At first, I was extremely impressed that a 50 employee company could design their own FPGA chip.
- tverbeure 7y agoRight. Here are the internals of the G2: https://tomverbeure.github.io/pano/logic/2018/12/02/Pano-Logic-G2-Disassembly.html https://tomverbeure.github.io/pano/logic/2018/12/02/Pano-Log...
- WatchDog 7y agoHow much would it cost to buy hardware equivalent to the Pano G2 as new?