migry
Member
Slightly off-topic, but there aren't many 32016 threads!
Having visited the web page previous highlighted Definicon DSI-32 co-processor emulation (some time ago), I downloaded the file "ns32032_dsi-32.7z". There's quite a lot of interesting stuff in there.
My interest in the NS32000 family dates back to 1985 when I worked for Nat Semi. I was really impressed by the architecture and was able to get my hands on a few parts. I built up a wire wrap board which had a small amount of EPROM and RAM (16k bytes). I programmed a trivial serial boot loader into the EPROMS. UART was a NS16450. I wrote an assembler on my Atari ST in Pascal, but then like many projects it got put on hold. While in Santa Clara in 1985 I did hear the rumour that Atari had been evaluating the 32016, but as we know they made the fatal choice of the 68000. I would have loved a NS32016 based Atari!!! Anyway a year or so ago, I got out the board and played with it. I had to disassemble the original boot loader and found a bug in the boot loader which limited the amount of bytes to be loaded to 256, and another bug introduced by my assembler. I tried to write a simple second stage loader, but I really needed a server on the PC to download the binary (I was having problems with Tera-Term). Before giving up I generated the schematics in KiCAD.
In the past 6 months I have had a number of PCBs manufactured by JLCPCB. These are to do with my 68000 project to run EMUTOS, interest initially triggered by a 68008 project called "Katy", which I tried to build on a breadboard. My real intention is to build a NS32016 board. My 68000 system uses a 40 pin bus and I have a CPU card, a RAM card, and a FPGA card (which does Atari video and serial comms). I use an Mega Arduino to load RAM using DMA (there is no ROM). The intention is to replace the 68000 card with a NS32016 card. In theory (if I could find a working NS32016 compiler) I could run EMUTOS on the NS32016 :D .
Anyway over the past few days I have been playing with the files from the above "dump". In the "set021387" I had success in running the emulator and getting it to compile and then run code. I then tried the GCC compiler. It worked for trivial examples but crashed when compiling Drystone code. BTW The same code compiled using the emulator. So I then fired up a Linux VM, copied over the GCC sources folder and spent an afternoon trying to get the makefile to run. There were a number of problems, including use of I assume now depricated functions. Eventually I got gcc and cpp to compile. While the cpp appears to work, cc1 (the compiler) crashes (aborts) during code generation. I compiled using debugging and there is nothing obviously wrong where it crashes, just an "abort()" in the default of a case statement. So I have no idea how to fix this.
Anyway hello to all the other NS32000 fanboys reading this thread. I am very interested in any projects anyone is still working on using this old CPU.
--migry
Having visited the web page previous highlighted Definicon DSI-32 co-processor emulation (some time ago), I downloaded the file "ns32032_dsi-32.7z". There's quite a lot of interesting stuff in there.
My interest in the NS32000 family dates back to 1985 when I worked for Nat Semi. I was really impressed by the architecture and was able to get my hands on a few parts. I built up a wire wrap board which had a small amount of EPROM and RAM (16k bytes). I programmed a trivial serial boot loader into the EPROMS. UART was a NS16450. I wrote an assembler on my Atari ST in Pascal, but then like many projects it got put on hold. While in Santa Clara in 1985 I did hear the rumour that Atari had been evaluating the 32016, but as we know they made the fatal choice of the 68000. I would have loved a NS32016 based Atari!!! Anyway a year or so ago, I got out the board and played with it. I had to disassemble the original boot loader and found a bug in the boot loader which limited the amount of bytes to be loaded to 256, and another bug introduced by my assembler. I tried to write a simple second stage loader, but I really needed a server on the PC to download the binary (I was having problems with Tera-Term). Before giving up I generated the schematics in KiCAD.
In the past 6 months I have had a number of PCBs manufactured by JLCPCB. These are to do with my 68000 project to run EMUTOS, interest initially triggered by a 68008 project called "Katy", which I tried to build on a breadboard. My real intention is to build a NS32016 board. My 68000 system uses a 40 pin bus and I have a CPU card, a RAM card, and a FPGA card (which does Atari video and serial comms). I use an Mega Arduino to load RAM using DMA (there is no ROM). The intention is to replace the 68000 card with a NS32016 card. In theory (if I could find a working NS32016 compiler) I could run EMUTOS on the NS32016 :D .
Anyway over the past few days I have been playing with the files from the above "dump". In the "set021387" I had success in running the emulator and getting it to compile and then run code. I then tried the GCC compiler. It worked for trivial examples but crashed when compiling Drystone code. BTW The same code compiled using the emulator. So I then fired up a Linux VM, copied over the GCC sources folder and spent an afternoon trying to get the makefile to run. There were a number of problems, including use of I assume now depricated functions. Eventually I got gcc and cpp to compile. While the cpp appears to work, cc1 (the compiler) crashes (aborts) during code generation. I compiled using debugging and there is nothing obviously wrong where it crashes, just an "abort()" in the default of a case statement. So I have no idea how to fix this.
Anyway hello to all the other NS32000 fanboys reading this thread. I am very interested in any projects anyone is still working on using this old CPU.
--migry