MiSTer Input Tester

Overview

A custom mini-system running an input test utility. There are 4 test screens available:

• Digital - shows joypad buttons for first two input devices
• Analog - shows analog axes for selected input device (cycle with a/b)
• Advanced - shows all standard HPS sourced inputs (joystick, analog, paddle, spinner) simultaneously as well as a ps2 keyboard console
• Button test - guided button test to help detect bounce / missed inputs and test man+machine lag

Hold (select) on the first joypad to enter the menu

Acknowledgements

Created by JimmyStones (http://github.com/jimmystones), with thanks to:

• alanswx (https://github.com/alanswx) for ideas, cross-platform simulation support, and the tutorial this core was based on
• Jotego (https://github.com/jotego) for his very tidy JTFRAME modules
• Porkchop Express (https://misteraddons.com/) for testing a bunch of devices I couldn't

History

• v1.0 - 2021-07-03 - First release with digital, analog and advanced tests
• v1.1 - 2021-07-18 - PETSCII UI update, add button test mode (unreleased!)
• v1.2 - 2021-10-17 - Add support for 2nd analog stick
• v1.3 - 2021-10-19 - Fix bugs, UI colour tweaks, remove console, show keyboard and mouse inputs on advanced mode

Hardware

A simple bespoke (i.e. I made it up with no real plan) 8-bit system with a 40x30 character display, each character foreground and background colour can be set independently to one of 256 colours. No sound capabilities whatsoever. All relevant MiSTer inputs are mapped into memory regions for the CPU to access directly. There is also a dedicated millisecond timer (runs 0-32677, resettable by writing to any bit of the address).

Components

• Z80 CPU (tv80 by Guy Hutchison, based on VHDL T80 core by Daniel Wallner)
• jtframe_vtimer for VGA timing (from JTFRAME (https://github.com/jotego/jtframe) by Jotego)
• jtframe_cen24 for clock enables (from JTFRAME (https://github.com/jotego/jtframe) by Jotego)
• 16Kb program ROM (port 1 cpu, port 2 download)
• 16Kb work RAM (port 1 cpu)
• 2Kb character ROM (port 1 cpu, port 2 download)
• 2Kb character RAM (port 1 cpu, port 2 graphics)
• 2Kb colour RAM (port 1 cpu, port 2 graphics)
• 9 Memory-mapped IO regions. Yes I know about MREQ but SFRs turned out to be annoying in sdcc so :)
  • Hardware state (H/V Sync, H/V Blank etc) (8 bytes, read-only)
  • joystick_5->0 from HPS (192 bytes, read-only)
  • joystick_l_analog_5->0 from HPS (96 bytes, read-only)
  • joystick_r_analog_5->0 from HPS (96 bytes, read-only)
  • paddle_5->0 from HPS (48 bytes, read-only)
  • spinner_5->0 from HPS (96 bytes, read-only)
  • ps2_key from HPS (11 bytes, read-only)
  • ps2_mouse from HPS (48 bytes, combination of ps2_mouse and ps2_mouseext with some padding to align bytes) - currently unused
  • timestamp from HPS (33 bytes, read-only)
• Hardware millisecond resolution timer (16 bytes read/write)

Memory Map

Start	End	Length	Name
0x0000	0x3FFF	0x4000	Program ROM
0x4000	0x47FF	0x0800	Char ROM
0x6000	0x6000	0x0001	System inputs (video signals)
0x7000	0x70BF	0x00C0	Joystick inputs
0x7100	0x715F	0x0060	Analog left inputs
0x7200	0x725F	0x0060	Analog right inputs
0x7300	0x732F	0x0030	Paddle inputs
0x7400	0x745F	0x0060	Spinner inputs
0x7500	0x750B	0x000C	PS2 keyboard input
0x7600	0x762F	0x0030	PS2 mouse input
0x7700	0x7720	0x0021	Timestamp
0x7800	0x7810	0x0011	Timer
0x8000	0x87FF	0x0800	Char RAM
0x8800	0x8FFF	0x0800	Colour RAM
0xC000	0xFFFF	0x4000	Work RAM

Software

/src contains a C program compiled to Z80 assembly using sdcc.

All required ROMs (compiled program and font) are built into this core.

Selecting Load BIOS in the core allows hot loading of binary OS ROM files for easier development.

Building the OS

Required packages

• sdcc
• srecord

Build steps

• Run make in /src/Makefile to create binary ROM
• Run od -An -t x1 -v src/os.bin > rtl/rom.hex to create hex version of ROM for Quartus build

License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.