3 ms·

That's right. Reasonable MiSTer setup will cost $150-$250. Still a lot cheaper than top of the line AMD/Intel CPU. MiSTer's FPGA could probably beat hypothetic

That's right. Reasonable MiSTer setup will cost $150-$250. Still a lot cheaper than top of the line AMD/Intel CPU. MiSTer's FPGA could probably beat hypothetical 10-50 GHz x86 CPU when absolute accuracy is desired. Emulating something as simple as Famicom (NES) accurately can bring 4 GHz CPU on its knees, see for example https://www.reddit.com/r/EmulationOnPC/comments/a5u7yn/what_sort_of_hardware_does_it_take_to_run_mesen/ https://www.reddit.com/r/EmulationOnPC/comments/a5u7yn/what_.... That said, emulators on x86 hardware (or even RPi) can be very good and even have very low latency. They're also more convenient, because they can save whole system state and even support smooth rewind.

naikrovek 7y ago
> MiSTer's FPGA could probably beat hypothetical 10-50 GHz x86 CPU when absolute accuracy is desired. You have clearly "drank the Kool-Aid" on this, and you are misinformed. Accuracy is not inherent to FPGAs. Yes, full transistor level simulation of a CPU is very slow on a different CPU, that's true. If your goal is to have cycle accurate gate level emulation of video game hardware, which produces perfectly accurate gameplay, then yes, an FPGA is where you go. If your goal is to play a perfectly accurate emulation of your game without worrying about emulated transistor state at every clock edge, then a CPU can do just fine, and it doesn't need to be some obscene clock speed to achieve that goal.
- vardump 7y ago
  > If your goal is to play a perfectly cycle accurate emulation of your game without worrying about emulated transistor state at every clock edge, then a CPU can do just fine CPU limitations are reached long before emulating a system at gate level! I think emulating a lowly 1 MHz 6502 at gate level could not run anywhere near realtime — even without any support chips. As someone who has written CPU based emulators, accurately synchronizing between multiple video, audio etc. support chips and even other CPUs can be very very difficult to do in real time. Trying to leverage modern multi-core CPUs has no advantage over single core ones, because inter-CPU synchronization latency far exceeds theoretical gains. You can get pretty close by cheating a bit as long as no software depends on exact timing. That's what most CPU based emulators do. I believe we should try to accurately preserve these early systems for the future generations. They'll be part of our cultural heritage and history.

naikrovek 7y ago

> MiSTer's FPGA could probably beat hypothetical 10-50 GHz x86 CPU when absolute accuracy is desired. You have clearly "drank the Kool-Aid" on this, and you are misinformed. Accuracy is not inherent to FPGAs. Yes, full transistor level simulation of a CPU is very slow on a different CPU, that's true. If your goal is to have cycle accurate gate level emulation of video game hardware, which produces perfectly accurate gameplay, then yes, an FPGA is where you go. If your goal is to play a perfectly accurate emulation of your game without worrying about emulated transistor state at every clock edge, then a CPU can do just fine, and it doesn't need to be some obscene clock speed to achieve that goal.

vardump 7y ago
> If your goal is to play a perfectly cycle accurate emulation of your game without worrying about emulated transistor state at every clock edge, then a CPU can do just fine CPU limitations are reached long before emulating a system at gate level! I think emulating a lowly 1 MHz 6502 at gate level could not run anywhere near realtime — even without any support chips. As someone who has written CPU based emulators, accurately synchronizing between multiple video, audio etc. support chips and even other CPUs can be very very difficult to do in real time. Trying to leverage modern multi-core CPUs has no advantage over single core ones, because inter-CPU synchronization latency far exceeds theoretical gains. You can get pretty close by cheating a bit as long as no software depends on exact timing. That's what most CPU based emulators do. I believe we should try to accurately preserve these early systems for the future generations. They'll be part of our cultural heritage and history.