3 ms·
One question about the Next. How flexible is the hardware in being able to support emulation of other machines? Would it be possible to reprogram the FPGA to em
by klelatti 6y ago
One question about the Next. How flexible is the hardware in being able to support emulation of other machines? Would it be possible to reprogram the FPGA to emulate say a C64?
- pjmlp 6y agoReally? Get a C64 clone instead then. The whole point is the renewed Speccy experience in a QL like packaging.
- xellisx 6y agoThere are 'roms' that can be loaded that will reconfigure the FPGA. The first release has that already.
- klelatti 6y agoThanks that's very helpful - I spotted BBC Master on one of the pages so will do some more research.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tyingq 6y agoSee the Mister FPGA project for what's possible. It supports a huge number of retro PCs, game consoles, arcade games, etc. https://www.retrorgb.com/mister.html https://www.retrorgb.com/mister.html However, this effort seems very wrapped in the Spectrum culture. I don't see any indication they want to deviate from that.
- codezero 6y agoIf you want a project for that, check out the Turbo Chameleon 64 - that piece of hardware can also emulate a lot of other systems. https://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php?title=Turbo_Chameleon_64 https://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php?title=Turbo_Chameleon_64
- reidrac 6y agoIt should be possible, there are other cores available: https://gitlab.com/victor.trucco/zx-spectrum-next-cores/-/tree/master/Cores https://gitlab.com/victor.trucco/zx-spectrum-next-cores/-/tr...
- klelatti 6y agoThanks - that's a great link. Noticed some 6502 based machines on the list.
- Koshkin 6y ago> FPGA Eww. I wish they stuck to using a real Z80 chip. (Otherwise they might as well just have emulated everything using an ARM SBC. With a gigabyte of RAM to boot. For 20 bucks.)
- flohofwoe 6y agoThe Z80 implementation in the ZX Next has a couple of useful extended instructions not found in the original Z80, and some of the instructions are tailored to the ZX Next hardware (e.g. to efficiently compute video memory addresses). So at least there's a justification for not using real Z80 chips...
- codezero 6y agoMy understanding is that they needed to to do this because one of the main chips, the video chip, is no longer available, and since they were using FPGA for that, I assume at that point the cost is driven down by just implementing Z80 in there too, with little loss of quality.
- tomcam 6y agoThat 20 bucks turns into about 100 added to retail with normal manufacturing price models. Source: Have consulted with several factories, and in several as well.