[Coco] First experiences with my DE1

[Frank Pittel]

On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 07:21:09PM +1000, Nick Marentes wrote:
> My DE1 has arrived and I was keen to get my CoCo3FPGA system up and running!
> 
> Many hours later, after harassing a few kind people with questions
> to the difficulties I was having, I finally got my DE1 running as a
> CoCo3... sort of.
> 
> There were still some problems and my CoCo3 was booting in Extended
> Basic only.
> 
> It was clear to me that for any complete newbie such as me to the
> world of FPGA, there is a real need for first-time-users
> instructions to get the CoCo3FPGA up and running smoothly.
> 
> I decided to see how other communities have been handling the DE1
> and I thought I search for the MSX systems.
> 
> In less than a 3 minutes, Goggle search had me at a page describing
> the entire process of getting the MSX files and how to load them
> into a DE1.
> 
> After grabbing the files and following the clear instructions on the
> website, I had an MSX 3 systems up and running within 10 minutes
> after my initial Google search.
> 
> Why can't we have something like this for the CoCo3FPGA to entice new users?
> 
> So, When I finally get my CoCo3FPGA up and running properly, I plan
> to create a similar page for this to explain to other newbies how to
> setup the DE1 with CoCo3FPGA.
> 
> The MSX instructions for those with a DE1 and wish to try it out are here:
> 
> http://www.msxinfo.net/2013/03/19/howto-flashing-the-altera-de1-as-a-msx/

I think most of us just struggled along the way that you did with help from
the mailing list/group on yahoo. I started to write up a beginners page on how
to make get the coco3fpga work with the DE1 but by then forgot all of the steps
I went through. :-)

The short instruction is to load the bios code into the flash rom. I don't have
the fpga code in the flash but reload from the altera loader software after rebooting
the coco. Not hard or painful since the same machine runs the drivewire server.

There's of course more to it but that's the basic gist of it. It's really not that hard
to do or figure out

The Other Frank