zet.aluzina.org

have you tried to program the bios.flash using the de1 control panell? it worked like a charm with the tests I did.

edit: I took a look at the bios.flash you produced using a hex editor, and I think something went wrong with the bin2flash. the bios.out file starts with hex 55 AA 40 E9. this is the begin of your bios.flash in ascii: S00D000062696F732E666C61736809..S3250000000055AA40E9. as you can see, it ends with 55 AA 40 E9. I don't know what happend, but I think you somehow converted the hex to ascii.

Can you post your bios.flash zipped up for me to try.

Thanks.

strange, I just finally got the nios thing working and I tried to run bin2flash, but it produces the same nonsense here. zeus, what are we doing wrong?

ah, I understand it now. the bios.flash we producd is ok, but you have to program the flash using the nios2 flash programmer. look at page 2 of this discussion how to do that. it worked for me.

edit: ok, the flash part. my screen is diplaying the same funny things as fordp's one. I think the sdram is giving trouble, I read something at minimig about trouble with different versions of the de1 and their sdram. fordp, how old is your de1? zet is using an old one.

edit: it wasn't minimig. I don't know what it was

and I found out something else, all leds are off!
so actually, zet isn't doing anything at all. what's going wrong?

I tried a pll to create a phase shift of -3 ns for the sdram chip. it doesn't work.

I gave zeus his DE1 and it is of the same batch as mine. They are not from the latest batch where the SDRAM seem to have more problems.

Yes Minimig would be the place where there was a lot of talk of SDRAM not working. I guess something is very marginal as the older and newer boards are very similar.

As you can tell from my image in this very thread my board runs Minimig fine.

There is no way the bios.flash is programmed correctly by either the NIOS software or the DE1 application as it reports the .flash file size has been programmed and NOT 128K.

The BIOS should clearly take the first 128k of the flash chip.

This is what happens when you program the bios.out file using the DE1 utility so in my view that is closer to what is needed.

If it is the BIOS roms that are at fault it may be an endianess issue or the location in the flash is not 0.

I cannot think of any other reason why it should not work.

I am pretty poor at HDL but I do have a BEng. in Digital System Engineering

I found the problem, it is indeedthe flash file. the nios programmer only programmed till 7fff. zeus, what did we do wrong?

I took a look at how the flash controller works, and I think the whole thing should work if we just program the bios.out in the flash. zues, why doing so difficult with those nios stuff? and, why doesn't it work?

Why is the ROM for Xilinx ML-403 board (http://zet.aluzina.org/index.php/Installation_guide) 256K but the ROM for the DE1 is only 128K ?????

Is this the reason for it not working?

Is the DE1 missing the VGA BIOS maybe?