had some pretty good progress tonight. got the board, soldered headers on, got it breadboarded, and got started trying to compile for the riscv core, and get the device flashed. 

there's good HAL support, actually, which is awesome: 
[ch32-hal](https://github.com/ch32-rs/ch32-hal)

i was able to eventually get it compiling, however flashing was a different story. 

apparently these chips don't have a 'standard' SWD implementation, and instead have some proprietary stuff from WCH which is annoying. 

there was this project, which has been inactive for 2 years: 
[picorvd](https://github.com/aappleby/picorvd) 

it took a decent amount of work to get that project running - had to fix a bunch of broken dependencies, CMAKE version issues causing CMAKE to exit (protip: `export CMAKE_POLICY_VERSION_MINIMUM=3.5` from [stackoverflow](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79534856/cannot-build-cmake-project-because-compatibility-with-cmake-3-5-has-been-remo). 

once that was all fixed, and i had soldered headers on / flashed a pico - i then had to get the riscv64 version of GDB running, and talking to the pico. GDB did seem to have trouble with the probe sometimes, but i was able to (i think) flash a program to one of the boards.... and it bricked. 

immediately i saw a bunch of activity on the SWD line, and the LED stopped blinking. 

what concerned me is that the waveform did not go away after a long period of time. i did determine that the pico was the one driving the line (on the ch32v it's SWIO, so because there were debug prints in the code, i thought it might have been from that). 

ultimately i think i'm going to just have to use the WCH Link(E?)... which is only $7 or so, but it does mean i'm going to have to wait for it...