Projects

AmiCrush / Build Log, Writing Candy Crush for the Amiga 500 in Bare-Metal C

Writing a full Candy Crush for a 7 MHz Amiga 500: a match-three engine tested by the thousand on a PC, the blitter tricks that get 24-pixel candies onto the right word boundary, a twenty-colour budget for six candies, difficulty tuned by simulation instead of by feel — and five rounds of fixing the wrong audio bug before I started measuring and found the real one. Boots from floppy, runs on real hardware.

PistormX 500 DIP / Build Log, From SRAM Hunt to Burned Chips and Back (part 2)

Building my own PistormX 500 DIP for the Amiga 500: finding an affordable SRAM, learning Xilinx ISE the hard way on Windows 11, and a long story about four dead CPLDs, a wrong regulator, a 2.8 ohm short, and how the Raspberry Pi I was using to flash kept killing the chips. Still not fully working, but a lot closer.

PistormX 500 DIP — Affordable SRAM Swap and Custom CPLD Build

Build log of my PistormX 500 DIP: hunting down an affordable replacement for the rare CY62177ESL SRAM, programming the Xilinx CPLD straight from a Raspberry Pi, and the battle to get Xilinx ISE 14.7 running on a modern Windows 11 laptop.