You need to have power on the chip. The .bit file indeed contains the FPGA code. The .MCS file is meant to be written to the flash chip, which can be done through the JTAG connection of the FPGA.

You could check if you can use the .svf file with your programmer.

Check the FAQ:

The .svf file is useful for programming the chip with non-Lattice tools which support SVF playback, e.g. Xilinx' Impact.

The next step has passed. I've received the boards: http://www.gc-forever.com/forums/download/file.php?id=2068 One more question - how does the Shuriken Video display the interlaced picture? Are you going to use the small XC3S50 FPGA or the XC3S200? With the XC3S200A you can enable the linedoubler ...

I can't really say how much the frequency matters on the drive. After some more investigation into my problem with high speed transfers it seemed that it was not due to the transfer itself but actually some cache issues due to some mistake I made. I'm not sure why it worked with smaller buffers sin...

Thanks for all the info! I am not sure if I have enough time next three weeks to work on it, or at least get far with it. One more question: does the frequency of the drive strobe matter much? When I use my SD Card with SPI at 25MHz I get bytes with a rate of 3MB/s, so my clock on the drive strobe i...

OK, I will keep the AVR8 in mind. Currently I really do not have the motivation to start almost from scratch again and try to understand a different softcore. I am now trying to synthesize the normal MBlite instead of the MBlite+. I have worked with the normal MBlite before. If I can get that to run...

Ok, then it should definitely be able to run a soft core at 50mhz. I took a quick peak at zpu, seems to run 4 cycles/instruction, which might be a bit slow. There are a couple of nice 32-bit soft cores, leon3 and openrisc that are synthesizable at pretty high frequencies, or if you want a small 8-b...

Which fpga chip are you running? I don't think 50mhz should be a problem for a light weight processor. You could also go for a simpler architecture if you find one which has a decent compile for it. Unless you are going to run an os on it an 8-bit cpu should have no problems. I wrote a nes emulator...

Are you analyzing the strobe signal in signaltap? If you do you will most likely break your timing if you still use it as a clock with rising edge, similar phenomenons can occur if you gate it and use as both clock and signal. The drive strength on the gc pins are quite low so analyzing any of the ...

Hi, What I mentioned about asserting the strobe signal is both the response from the drive, AND also the strobe signal from the cube, after a read request has ben performed the cube strobe signal remains high until the interface is ready to receive the response, then it is pulled low to indicate th...

Now I just count how many bytes I have received from the Cube and set the register based on that. That seems to have solved it. Do you always receive the full "packet" from the Cube or is it possible to receive partial data if all registers are not set? I always seem to receive 12 bytes, ...

Sounds like a fun project, hope you get the double read issues sorted. When I wrote my drive emulator I remember that I had to consider the timing of when to assert the drives strobe signal to acknowledge commands, but i guess a timing issue there would cause other errors. I think 2.3MB/s is not th...

I am really confused. I am sending the offset that is requested from the disc over UART to my PC (the drive emualtor sends it, not the Cube). I run CleanRip to dump a disc with the drive emulator. It seems from time to time certain addresses are requested twice. CleanRip seems to request 0x10000 byt...

Small update. I used CleanRip to dump Melee with the drive emulator. I get around 430 KB/s of throughput, but I also send every received command over UART, which blocks the response (normally that is turned off, but CleanRip does not seem to like it if I respond quickly). The dumped disc is showing ...

Are you using the multi-sector read command in SPI? It really speeds things up, at "32 MHz" I get 2.3MB/s with it I am not. I could definitely look into that later. 2.3MB/s does sound fast enough to mimic a drive well enough. For now I just want to try to get things to work. Speed should ...

In the direct mode if a disc read doesn't align with the start of a sector, I guess you just tick the SPI clock until you reach the beginning of the data you need to return? Yes, that is correct. Same goes for a read that does not align with the end of the last sector. The SPI clock is ticked until...

I am running it in SPI mode at 12.5 MHz, so that gives 12.5/8=1.56MB/s at most. I tried increasing the clock, but my SD Card does not seem to like it, which is really strange to me, as I read somewhere 25 MHz should be possible.. 25 MHz is indeed possible, at least I had cards running with that spe...

Swiss boots from the SD Card! Now I can just load my games through SD to EXI, so I am done with this project!

Just kidding. This does give me some opportunities though. Perhaps give cleanrip a try for instance.

It might just be a timing issue. Plenty of GC games make bad assumptions about how long disk access should take, for example they issue a read, clear a flag and then poll while waiting for a read-complete callback to set the same flag... except if the read completes too fast (before the flag is ini...

That's not something the drive ("mass access storage device") has to handle, the disk interface (the hardware that sits between the MMIO regs and the physical drive connector) takes care of it. That is what I figured as well. Thanks for the responses so far. I will try to figure out what ...

Have you compared what a real drive returns for 0x12000000? IIRC it's 16 (maybe even 32) bytes total, there are four zeroes each before and after the data shown in your post. I have. It is 32 bits indeed. When I start Zelda I think that is the only command that is issued. I suppose when you insert ...

I reply this as well to 0x12000000: *(u32*)(dvd[DI_DMAADDR]+4) = 0x20010608; *(u32*)(dvd[DI_DMAADDR]+8) = 0x61000000; I am not sure what you mean with handling values on the DVD Status Register? When I use a very slow implementation of SD reading. I can get Melee to boot, but it seems to hang on the...

Tried pressing the 'A' button at startup. I did not know about that one. I guess that shows how little I know about the GameCube. I reply pretty fast to the read disc ID command, but it still goes into the system menu. Anyways, when I press 'A', I get into the system menu and the disc is actually re...

I dumped it with a Wii that does not have a modchip, iirc. I suppose the modchip will "corrupt" the dump when you use cleanrip? I am getting a bit further. The GameCube now boots into a black screen when I disable the logic analyzer. I think there is a timing issue somewhere. When I still ...

I was indeed using a modchip. I tried a drive without one and the output is now the same. It is still not working, so I have some debugging to do.