Ken, et. al.,
It has been about a year since the last post. Was there ever any resolution about a 64 bit KCPSM3?
I recently tried the Spartan 3 PicoBlaze and ran into the 64 bit compatibility issue. I worked around it for the assembler by using a virtual machine to do the assembly. A bit of a pain, but it works.
The Spartan 3 stuff is for my home/hobby projects, but I am using PicoBlaze on a Virtex 6 at work (I do the software). While PicoBlaze itself is a very clever and elegant piece of engineering, the assembler leaves a bit to be desired.
I searched for a better one and couldn't find much. It appears the Mediatronix one is not well supported and I don't even know if PB6 is actually supported. So, I wanted to share my solution in case anyone else has sufficiently complex PB software to want things like expressions, includes files, data segment definitions and such.
There is a table-driven cross assembler called TASM (search for TASM SVS -- you'll get a Comcast user's page). I created my own table for the PB6 and then wrote utilities to convert the object output to the hex and vhdl files needed by the Xilinx tools. I have been using it to build and then download via the Jtag loader and works great.
Don't let the TASM home page fool you. This assembler has been around for a decade or two and is very powerful. A license is $25 and includes source code. (It is shareware so you can try it first.) I actually used this software in the late '80 and early '90s in a course I taught and I was surprised to see it still available. It has "changed hands" a couple of times, but it appears that the original author is still involved.
If anyone is interested in more information about the PB table and conversion tools, let me know. I should point out that I did not make a table for PB3, which is why I was looking for a 64 bit solution for KCPSM3. The table should not be hard, escpecially with the PB6 table as an example.
Best Regards,
Lance
