Here comes a new release with performance improvements and useful improvements on the software side.

Turbo mode optimisation

There has been a pass of optimisations in the memory accesses in Turbo mode.

The two wait cycles on reads are gone, and read burst management has had its latency reduced by a few cycles. Performance has therefore improved, as you can see on the new results:

The average peformance is now 540% of that of a real ST, which is 28% faster than the previous release of zeST (420%). We are still not at full 50 MHz because of some read cache misses, but also because of wait cycles on memory writes which still write to DDR every time and have wait cycles (this is a write-through cache).

ACSI improvements

I have improved the hard disk “firmware code”, so now it supports most standard ACSI/SCSI commands and error codes.

Now partitioning tools work; you can configure new drives from the running Atari without the need of an emulator on PC.

zeST is also now ready to support multiple drives. Hard disk configuration is now on a separate submenu so you can configure the 8 ACSI IDs independently.

Wi-Fi support

Wi-Fi now works for the embedded Linux OS that runs on the Zynq’s ARM core. Support is still experimental for now.

Since none of the boards zeST supports has an integrated Wi-Fi device, Wi-Fi only works through the use of a USB Wi-Fi dongle.

Only a few USB Wi-Fi drivers are currently integrated in zeST. They are RTL87xx and RTL88xx drivers for some Realtek-based devices. If you would like support for another device, please contact me.

Other improvements

• Some disk management toolkits have been installed: parted, dosfstools, mtools.
• There’s a script making use of the above to easily create a new hard disk image file with multiple partitions.
• The documentation has had important updates to take all the latest changes into account.

That’s all folks!

Thank you for reading this release report.

As usual, download and installation instructions are available on the getting started page.

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