Texas Instruments TMS1000 In An FPGA
Posted: August 14, 2024
Introduction
The Texas Instruments TMS1000 and TMS1100 were series of microcontrollers that were used in many old 1970's electronics including the Speak n' Spell, the Little Professor calculator, and the electronic Simon game. This project brings the TMS1000 (and TMS1100) back from the dead and shows it running the same software that ran on the original Simon device.
This webpage is currently a work in progress. More info coming later.
Currently the core seems to be working (a test LED blinks) and it's able to execute the original ROM for the old 1970's Simon electronics game.
I was able to get the ROMs from Sean Riddle's website (https://seanriddle.com/simon.html) and a schematic from Waiting For Friday (https://www.waitingforfriday.com/?p=586).
The FPGA devkit used to develop and debug the code was the iceFUN FPGA board (Lattice iCE40-HX8K) along with the opensource IceStorm tools. The FPGA devkit used in the Simon circuit is IceBlips with a smaller iCE40-LP1K.
Related Projects @mikekohn.net
| FPGA: | FPGA VGA, Nexys2, Glow In The Dark Memory, Intel 8008, F100-L, RISC-V, x86 / 68000, MSP430, PowerPC, W65C832 |
Video coming soon.
The rows of LEDs are used for debugging. The rows of LEDS (from left to right) are:
- Register X, Register Y
- Flag S, Accumulator
- Page, PC
- CPU state register (fetch, decode, halt, etc)
Testing And Debugging
This project really needs a program that tests every instruction and does a halt if there is a problem. At some point I could add that, but I don't have the time right now.
Pictures
Source code
https://github.com/mikeakohn/tms1000_fpga
Copyright 1997-2024 - Michael Kohn
