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• Sprite Animation With a Tiny Bit of Hardware Acceleration

  slederer • 05/21/2026 at 20:35 • 0 comments

  A new demo is out, showing an animation using software sprites. At first, that did not go well and there was much flickering. Then I added some minimal hardware acceleration to the video controller.  It does only pixel shifting and masking in hardware, which were the most costly parts in the software sprite routines. Now the sprite drawing is about five times faster, resulting in a smooth, flicker-free animation.
  

  Here is a video showing the animation demo before and after adding the tiny hardware accelerator:

  The demo only works on the real hardware, because it plays a sound effect and the emulator does not support the audio controller yet.

• 2025 Christmas Demo

  slederer • 12/26/2025 at 14:57 • 0 comments

  The 2025 christmas demo is here.

  
  It uses a recreation of the well-known VGA fire effect, and it required some assembly language routines for a smooth animation. There is also some very simple tile-based animation. I wanted to have some music and sound in the demo but that did not work out. There seems to be a bug in the interrupt mechanism that is triggered when code is executed in DRAM (i.e. with wait states). So I probably have long debugging sessions with the integrated logic analyzer ahead of me. And I should finally draw that big timing diagram.

  Merry Christmas and happy holidays everyone!
  

• October 2025 Update - Data Cache and Audio

  slederer • 10/14/2025 at 21:07 • 0 comments

  The October 2025 Update is here!

  With this update of the logic design, the Tridora-CPU now has a data cache. It is very similar to the instruction cache that was added with the April 2025 update: It caches the 16 bytes that the DRAM controller delivers anyway.

  For decent performance, it had to be implemented as a write-back cache. So when a write to the cached area happens, the cache is not invalidated (as in the simpler write-through cache). Instead, the write is going to RAM and will update the cache. This is because with the stack machine architecture and especially in the code generated by the Pascal compiler, it is very common to read, write and read again the same variable. So a write-through cache would be invalidated quite often and would have a much worse performance.

  Fortunately, the write-back cache was easier to implement than I thought, and the result is really noticable.

  Building the "hello,world" program now takes about 15 seconds instead of 20.

  There were also some minor tweaks for the SD-Card controller so it has a slightly higher transfer rate, and that brings down the build time to about 14 seconds.

  Updated benchmark results are here:
  

  https://gitlab.com/slederer/Tridora-CPU/-/blob/main/examples/benchmarks.results.text

  In comparison to the version without instruction and data cache, the new version has a three times better performance in the empty loop benchmark. In comparison to the last version with instruction cache, the improvement is factor 1.6.

  The other important thing in the October 2025 is the audio controller. The Tridora-CPU can now make sounds, using a Digilent AMP2 PMOD. At first, I implemented four channels of rectangle waves and a noise generator. Then I scrapped that and went for interrupt-driven sample playback. So now you can play a sample file in the background from your Pascal programs.

  Here is a video of the Tridora-CPU making some noises and playing music: 

• ECL-Rogue on the Tridora-CPU: A Porting Adventure

  slederer • 05/27/2025 at 21:59 • 0 comments

  I have also been working on the software side, fixing bugs in the compiler and assembler that showed up when compiling more complex software.

  The latest result is ECL-Rogue: A variant of the well-known game Rogue that was originally written in C on Unix. This version is written in Pascal, and it was written for the Pascal-Compiler on the PDP-10, a 36-Bit word-oriented mainframe computer from the 1970s.

  It took many small changes to make it compile with Tridora-Pascal (and FreePascal), and there were also parts written in PDP-10 assembly language (e.g. accessing the score file) and system calls to the TOPS-20 operating system that needed to be rewritten.

  Apparently the PDP-10 Pascal compiler was very close to the original Pascal compiler from Niklaus Wirth and his team, and that means: No strings! Just packed array of char, padded with spaces. That required a lot of little changes. I also noticed that Tridora-Pascal is a lot stricter than FreePascal when accessing strings: In FreePascal (and Turbo-Pascal in the good old days), it is not an error to read/write chars beyond the current end of the string. So, more of those little changes.

  But in the end, I got it working while keeping the source code mostly the same, and now you can play ECL-Rogue on the Tridora-CPU. You can also compile it with FreePascal.

  Link to the source repository of the ported version (see the README there for the original version):

  https://gitlab.com/slederer/ecl-rogue-m
  

  Check out this video of me playing:

  The Tridora emulator image has also been updated to include ECL-Rogue.

• The Tridora Got an Instruction Cache

  slederer • 05/27/2025 at 21:40 • 0 comments

  There have been a few updates to the Tridora-CPU:
  

  The clock frequency was reduced from 83MHz to 77MHz to allow for some additions to the Verilog code: I have at last implemented an instruction cache.

  
  Now on the Tridora-CPU, the first 64KB of RAM are static RAM (created from BRAM). The rest is DRAM (256MB on the Arty-A7), and this is accessed via a memory controller generated my MIG, the Memory Interface Generator in Vivado. This memory controller has a latency of 21 cycles and always transfers at least 16 bytes. Good for bursting data to cache lines in modern CPUs, not optimal for my simplicistic design.

  To make matters worse, the CPU uses 32-bit words, but 16-bit instructions. So for an instruction fetch, the CPU reads 32 bits, then throws half of them away to get the instruction. For the next instruction, it will fetch the same 32 bits again, then throw the other half away to get the second instruction in that 32 bit word. This does not matter when executing out of SRAM, but is really bad when executing out of DRAM.

  So an instruction cache was needed. I added a signal from the CPU that indicates an instruction fetch (in contrast to a data read/write), and implemented a simple caching mechanism that just stores the 16 bytes from the last read, and satisfies the read request from that if the read address is in the same 16-byte segment.

  In the optimal case, 8 instructions will now take 53 clock cycles instead of 200.
  

  I have created a benchmark program in Pascal for some measurements, and in some benchmarks the improvement is about factor two.

  In others, it is less noticable, depending on the amount of data memory accesses which are not cached. Also, some benchmarks exercise operations which are assembly subroutines which reside in SRAM, for example, integer multiplication or all floating point operations.

  Many programs do not run noticably faster though, because they fit inside the first 64KB of RAM. For the benchmark to show any difference, I had to hack the assembly code to move the code above the 64KB boundary.

  The full benchmark results can be seen here: https://gitlab.com/slederer/Tridora-CPU/-/raw/main/examples/benchmarks.results.text

  This is the benchmark source code: https://gitlab.com/slederer/Tridora-CPU/-/raw/main/examples/benchmarks.pas

• Reduced Compile Times with new Assembler Feature

  slederer • 11/18/2024 at 00:46 • 0 comments

  The assembler got a new feature to decrease compile/assembly times.

  It can now import preassembled binaries, which is used for the standard library.
  

  This is not really a linker, because it cannot do relocation. So it can only import one binary at a fixed address, but that is good enough for now.

  Compiling and assembling "Hello World" now takes 20 seconds instead of 60.
  

  See the video showing this feature in action:
  

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