11–20 of 33 posts
Very cool. I have wanted to try some FPGA stuff out but it seems like its very encumbered by proprietary toolchains and industry secrets. Wondering what the pros/cons are of using this vs a raspberry pi.
Raspberry is emulation which will not be console accurate. The FPGA would more accurate since it is recreating the console on a hardware level(chip)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Raspberry is emulation which will not be console accurate. The FPGA would more accurate since it is recreating the console on a hardware level(chip)
To expand on that, Higan[1] is a super accurate SNES emulator that requires a decent CPU to run at full speed due to all of the weird quirks and on-cartridge chips[2]. For the popular games, typical emulators are probably good enough, but for true accuracy of all the quirks and special chips you need quite a bit of compute power. In the case of Speedy Gonzales, at least for a time (not sure if it's still the case) th…
Higan has been in development for more than a decade, and literally every first party SNES game has been tested to ensure 100% compatibility. By contrast, since the Super NT was released, its creators have issued multiple patches to fix game-specific issues that were discovered. As is expected in the development of any emulator, it is likely that these patches have created new problems in other games, which haven't been discovered yet.
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[1] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:uHa892...
Sidenote, the above link is using Google's cache. Byuu appears to have not only deleted all the articles from his site, but also prevented the Wayback Machine from preserving copies of them.
Byuu, please don't do this! You've spent your life making sure old video games are preserved for future generations! The Internet Archive should be allowed to preserve your work as well.
Very cool. I have wanted to try some FPGA stuff out but it seems like its very encumbered by proprietary toolchains and industry secrets. Wondering what the pros/cons are of using this vs a raspberry pi.
It's odd the MiSTer page doesn't even list an Atari ST core as available. Odd given the heritage (and name).
On the other hand, there's an X68000 core. That's pretty amazing.
But apart from bigger FPGA one of the big advantages of MiSTer over MiST is HDMI output. Dealing with VGA is a real pain in the but, esp if you want to hook up to a living room TV.
I'll probably invest in MiSTer at some point, but it would be nice if they had an expansion which added MIDI and 9-pin joystick ports like you could get on the MiST.
Very cool. I have wanted to try some FPGA stuff out but it seems like its very encumbered by proprietary toolchains and industry secrets. Wondering what the pros/cons are of using this vs a raspberry pi.
The IceStorm tools are open source, based on the reverse-engineered Lattice iCE40 FPGA architecture: http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/ I found it very easy to get started, although first you have to buy a compatible FPGA (iCEstick etc.) and make an adapter for your preferred output device. The advantage of the MISTer is that you have all the connectors, FPGA cores for popular platforms and a couple of ARMs for when th…
Very cool. I have wanted to try some FPGA stuff out but it seems like its very encumbered by proprietary toolchains and industry secrets. Wondering what the pros/cons are of using this vs a raspberry pi.
One pro is that you could easily make an ASIC from the FPGA code, if your design is locked and you wanted to pump out a few million for cheap.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The IceStorm tools are open source, based on the reverse-engineered Lattice iCE40 FPGA architecture: http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/ I found it very easy to get started, although first you have to buy a compatible FPGA (iCEstick etc.) and make an adapter for your preferred output device. The advantage of the MISTer is that you have all the connectors, FPGA cores for popular platforms and a couple of ARMs for when th…
The iCE40 and Cyclone V are worlds apart. Yes, there's a free toolchain for iCE40, but you haven't an ice cube's chance in Hades of emulating a console CPU with the 7680 LUTs available on the largest chip in the line. By comparison, the Cyclone V found in the MISTer has over 100,000 LUTs. Alas, it has no free toolchain.
https://hackaday.com/2018/03/29/apple-one-on-fpga/#more-3012...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To expand on that, Higan[1] is a super accurate SNES emulator that requires a decent CPU to run at full speed due to all of the weird quirks and on-cartridge chips[2]. For the popular games, typical emulators are probably good enough, but for true accuracy of all the quirks and special chips you need quite a bit of compute power. In the case of Speedy Gonzales, at least for a time (not sure if it's still the case) th…
Byuu, the author of Higan, has been quite critical[1] of the claim that the Super NT is as accurate as stated. It may be tempting to assume "FPGA = hardware recreation = perfect", but we don't have access to the original SNES schematics, so anything we recreate involves some level of guesswork. Higan has been in development for more than a decade, and literally every first party SNES game has been tested to ensure 10…
Very cool. I have wanted to try some FPGA stuff out but it seems like its very encumbered by proprietary toolchains and industry secrets. Wondering what the pros/cons are of using this vs a raspberry pi.