working FPGA version of the amiga floppy project

So, I’ve been working on the FPGA version of the amiga floppy project for some time.  I just recently had a fair bit of free time, and so everything came together rather quickly!

I’m now able to read amiga floppy disks in using the same Java client software I had developed for use with the Parallax SX microcontroller board.  There were a few minor changes in the software — most notably the read data routine from the hardware.

I’ve written the code in Verilog on a Xilinx Spartan-3e evaluation board.

The various hardware parts I’ve described:

• UART: Written from scratch, a transmitter and a receiver.   Simple to use, variable baud rates.
• FIFO: Generated from Xilinx’s CoreGen. This connects the floppy interface to the USB interface. 32k bytes
• FSM to always empty the FIFO to the PC.  Once something goes in the FIFO, it immediately gets sent to the PC
• Read-floppy-FSM: Stores 225ms of Delta T’s (aka time between edges) as 8-bit integers into the FIFO.
• Command FSM: Receives single-character commands from the java software to execute (R for read, U for upper head, L for lower head, etc)
• Transmit test pattern routine: Sends 32k of data to the PC to test for reliable communication

A couple advantages with the FPGA solution:

• We transmit the data to the PC as soon as it’s available.  I want to characterize the actual latency, but it should be pretty small.  This is different from my load->FRAM, and then FRAM-> PC method.  This method should be much faster and we’re just not idling for 225ms.
• Instead of transmitting the bit-sync’d raw MFM to the PC, I’m sending the delta T’s.  While this requires a little more processing on PC, the PC can more easily determine why a particularly sector can’t be read.  For instance, is the time between pulses too small? Too large?  On a fringe edge?  Plus, since the Java decodes these, I can now add sliders for “acceptable delta T’s” for each 4, 6, or 8us windows.  Before that would require modifying the firmware on the microcontroller.  I can also start to do statistical analysis on the pulse times.

I am currently doing about 430ms per track.  This sucks.  I was beating that by 100ms with my microcontroller.  However, the problem is that because a variable amount of data is going to the PC, the PC receiving code does not know when exactly to stop receiving, so there’s a wait-timer which I have to optimize.  Once I receive the minimum amount of data, I wait 100ms since the last received data, and then exit.  I’ve got to put my logic analyzers in place and figure out how to optimize it.

Denis@h3q can read a disk in 43s, which is pretty darn good.  He is using tokens like I mentioned here and here and here.  I’m transferring much more data though, which gives me more information.  I like his time, and maybe that would be a nice goal to beat!  Wow. That’s only 269ms/track.  Hrrrmm…. that’s pretty good.