MiSTer: Run Amiga, SNES, NES and Genesis on an FPGA
1–10 of 33 posts
Re: MiSTer: Run Amiga, SNES, NES and Genesis on an FPGA
#2Very 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.
Re: MiSTer: Run Amiga, SNES, NES and Genesis on an FPGA
#3Very 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.
Re: MiSTer: Run Amiga, SNES, NES and Genesis on an FPGA
#4Very 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 things get complicated.
Raspberry PI is fine, but not great for latency, assuming you need that extra 1/60 second. (HDMI monitors add so much latency though!) Some folks have had success connecting PIs to old CRTs though.
Re: MiSTer: Run Amiga, SNES, NES and Genesis on an FPGA
#5Very 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 linked page has a section on why this was done on an FPGA instead of a pi: https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki/Why-FPGA
Re: MiSTer: Run Amiga, SNES, NES and Genesis on an FPGA
#6Very 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)
Re: MiSTer: Run Amiga, SNES, NES and Genesis on an FPGA
#7Very 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)
I think it's more fair to say that a RPi probably isn't powerful enough to run the emulators that are completely accurate, because some of them do exist.
Re: MiSTer: Run Amiga, SNES, NES and Genesis on an FPGA
#8Very 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)
It's not a direct replication of the original chip though. It's an emulation of the functional results, written to work well on an FPGA, and run in parallel.
Re: MiSTer: Run Amiga, SNES, NES and Genesis on an FPGA
#9Earlier 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)
I think it's more fair to say that a RPi probably isn't powerful enough to run the emulators that are completely accurate, because some of them do exist.
You may get good emulators but not many will be console accurate on all fronts
Re: MiSTer: Run Amiga, SNES, NES and Genesis on an FPGA
#10Very 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)
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) the only emulator you could actually beat the game on was Higan.
By comparison, Analogue sells the Super NT which is their own FPGA SNES that uses micro USB for power and probably requires about as much power as a Pi, but is comparable to Higan in terms of accuracy. Their implementation still uses physical carts though, so they skipped on implementing the special chips that were contained in the cartridge of various games. For _that_, there is the SD2SNES flash cart which runs its own FPGA for most of the chips (SA-1 support in beta).
[1] https://byuu.org/emulation/higan/ [2] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-...