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Building an FPGA 3dfx Voodoo with Modern RTL Tools

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Re: Building an FPGA 3dfx Voodoo with Modern RTL Tools

#31

Post by girvo »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #19
ekelsen wrote: post #4

The project is cool, but the LLM generated blog bothers my brain.

I tend to feel the same way, although I'm actively trying to move past it. I'm OK at writing, but thanks to a combination of educational background and natural aptitude, I'm darned near illiterate at higher math. That puts me behind the 8-ball as an engineer, even though I've been reasonably successful at both hardware and software work. I tend to miss tricks that are obvious to my peers, but when I do manage to come…

> before long it won't be possible to call AI writing out anyway

Once we're there, we're there. Tree falling in a forest with no one around, etc. Once that happens then I'll stop reacting badly to it, but it hasn't yet (not without careful prompting anyway).

Re: Building an FPGA 3dfx Voodoo with Modern RTL Tools

#33

Post by userbinator »

girvo wrote: post #30
ekelsen wrote: post #4

The project is cool, but the LLM generated blog bothers my brain.

I find your (and my!) reaction to LLM generated text fascinating. It has a distinct smell, and I honestly can't really put words to why I find it repellent, I just know that I do.

It's overly verbose, the phrasing and sentence structure are very unusual for the topic, and it has the classic LLM slop tropes.

Re: Building an FPGA 3dfx Voodoo with Modern RTL Tools

#34

Post by PostOnce »

covercash wrote: post #27
ashwinnair99 wrote: post #7

The Voodoo cards had no right to look as good as they did for their time. Someone rebuilding one from scratch is exactly the kind of project HN was made for.

Tribes 1 looked so good thanks to Glide…

I love the software look so much though! I never did like the blurring of textures :)

They're both beautiful in their own way, the darkness and glow in the hardware versions, some certain pixellated charm and roughness in the software version

Re: Building an FPGA 3dfx Voodoo with Modern RTL Tools

#35

Post by pezezin »

sprash wrote: post #18
ashwinnair99 wrote: post #7

The Voodoo cards had no right to look as good as they did for their time. Someone rebuilding one from scratch is exactly the kind of project HN was made for.

Yes but the Nvidia NV-1 preceding the Vooodoo was much more impressive. Using NURBS you could display perfectly round objects. Also it had forward texture mapping which significantly improves cache utilization and would be beneficial even today. It was just way harder to program for. Triangles are much simpler to understand than bezier curves after all. And after Microsoft declared that DirectX only supports triangle…

> Also it had forward texture mapping which significantly improves cache utilization and would be beneficial even today.

Not really. Forward texture mapping simplifies texture access by making framebuffer access non-linear, reverse texture mapping has the opposite tradeoff. But that is assuming rectangular textures without UV mapping, like the Sega Saturn did; the moment you use UV mapping texture access will be non-linear no matter what. Besides that, forward texture mapping has serious difficulties the moment texture and screen sampling ratios don't match, which is pretty much always.

There is a reason why only the Saturn and the NV-1 used forward texture mapping, and the technology was abandoned afterwards.

Re: Building an FPGA 3dfx Voodoo with Modern RTL Tools

#37

Post by Joel_Mckay »

qrios wrote: post #36

It’s been a while since I’ve struggled with Xilinx tools, but I can’t imagine there aren’t any hardware limitations these days. Does this run on a Spartan 6, or do you need the latest UltraScale for it? Or does this only run in simulation anyway?

FPGA simulations are a naive attempt to guess at Metastability problems by finding a "steady state" latency after a certain amount of simulation time. Clock domain crossing mitigation only gets folks so far, and state propagation issues often get worse with larger and faster chips.

Note, there are oversized hobby Voodoo cards that max out the original ASIC count and memory limits. There are also emulators like 86box that simulate the hardware just fine for old games.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4295RCp0GQ

>Or does this only run in simulation anyway?

If they are a LLM user, than it is 100% an April fools joke. =3

Re: Building an FPGA 3dfx Voodoo with Modern RTL Tools

#38

Post by Tsiklon »

fer wrote: post #29
Tsiklon wrote: post #23

Tangentially related, that screenshot of Screamer 2 caught me off guard completely, I loved that game to death, and I feel I was the only one of my friends to have played it. Tremendous handling model and superb music.

I loved it, though from that era I liked Fatal Racing the most.

Surprisingly the original developers Milestone are doing a reboot/reimagining of the series which is out this week.

Re: Building an FPGA 3dfx Voodoo with Modern RTL Tools

#39

Post by burnt-resistor »

I guess it's cool because it could possibly produce a single board design able to emulate many designs with a flash update including SLI requiring 2 Voodoo cards plus a host 2D card that could all be placed onto said one card. I don't know how one engineers the analog DAC bandwidth to render SVGA faithfully at 1600x1200 @ 60 Hz from a FPGA frame buffer though.

Btw, most 8 MiB vintage Voodoo 2 cards can be upgraded to 12 MiB by simply soldering on more RAM. I managed to snag a bunch of legit 125 MHz chips that work with every card produced.

Re: Building an FPGA 3dfx Voodoo with Modern RTL Tools

#40

Post by fayalalebrun »

qrios wrote: post #36

It’s been a while since I’ve struggled with Xilinx tools, but I can’t imagine there aren’t any hardware limitations these days. Does this run on a Spartan 6, or do you need the latest UltraScale for it? Or does this only run in simulation anyway?

This fits and runs in a DE-10 Nano without too much difficulty, uses around 70% of the fabric. I've been working on timing closure and just got it to 50 MHz.

Note that I also implemented cache components not present in the original Voodoo in order to be more flexible in terms of the memory that can be used. So it could be quite a bit smaller, maybe 50% of the fabric if you got rid of that.

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