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Mister FPGA: The Future of Game and Computer Emulation
- zdw 5y agoThis is a 2019 article and quite a bit out of date. There's a dedicated forum for the project: https://misterfpga.org/ https://misterfpga.org/ Many more cores have been supported or further polished, well into the 32 bit era - Playstation and Sega Saturn cores are in the works.
- voltagex_ 5y agoWhat happens when the DE10 Nanos run out?
- ungamed 5y agoI believe they already have, at least interntionally.
- vardump 5y agoPresumably it gets ported to another architecture.
- postalrat 5y agoI've been hoping it somehow ends up available for pano logic client devices. No idea how big a project that be but it would be pretty cool since there are a reasonable number of them out there, they are kinda cheap, and are already in a nice case.
- snvzz 5y agoOr, simpler, somebody comes up with a OSHW board that's actually fit for purpose, rather than leverage a generic devboard.
- christkv 5y agohttps://rmcretro.store/multisystem-board-only/ https://rmcretro.store/multisystem-board-only/ Seems like a good start
- vidarh 5y agoThat still needs a dev board mounted on it.
- vidarh 5y agoThere are lots of boards being designed, some of which have been open, but they tend to be expensive because of the small runs. The open cores tends to end up ported to multiple platforms over time.
- anyfoo 5y agoIs that simpler? Dev boards are a dime a dozen, and far from everyone who wants to use FPGAs to mimic game consoles wants (or can) solder them themselves... I feel like if this platform runs out, people will mostly switch to another generic one with not too much effort.
- snvzz 5y agoBy now, I would dare say miSTer has enough traction that a custom board would make sense. As a reminder, few people use bare DE10-Nano. It is generally used together with custom boards for RAM and I/Os, designed for miSTer use. There's nothing magical about FPGAs or SMD as to prevent a main board designed for the purpose.
- girvo 5y agoIs there any upside to replacing it with an ASIC specifically for miSTer?
- snvzz 5y agoI can't think of any, relative to a FPGA. MiSTer cores are regularly upgraded; an ASIC would defeat the point. What's being proposed is a board that's designed for miSTer. Such a board would include an appropriate FPGA, alongside memory, a better cooling solution and ports useful for miSTer use. These are currently accomplished via mods/addons to the generic devboard, which is far from ideal.
- melony 5y agoElectrical engineers are cheap. Porting to a slightly different layout can be easily crowdfunded.
- gchadwick 5y agoHopefully terasic will keep making them for a good while and when they do retire them have a replacement. It's not as simple as just develop a new board as the DE10 Nano offers a great price / performance ratio. There are more capable FPGA boards out there but they're also more expensive. Any purpose developed board would also likely cost more.
- AlexanderDhoore 5y agoAmazon.com: DE10-Nano Kit Currently unavailable. We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock.
- sibane 5y agoAlso, on Mouser: Stock: 0 On Order: 2,877 Expected 1/28/2022 Factory Lead-Time: 48 Weeks Long lead time reported on this product.
- jiveturkey 5y agoooh glad I squirrelled 2 of them away pre-COVID
- snvzz 5y agoI would say miSTer's weakest point is that it isn't designed for the open FPGA synth, place and route stack. It depends on proprietary tools tied to Intel's FPGAs. This is somewhat understandable, as the open stack wasn't ready when miST was conceived.
- phendrenad2 5y agoPart of the appeal of mister is it runs on cheap "dev" FPGA boards that have their price reduced to appeal to students and educators. Those are typically boards from Intel and Xilinx. It's been awhile since I looked at open FPGA synth tools, but I remember that Intel support was non-existent and Xilinx support was rudimentary. You couldn't get the same performance and packing as you can with the proprietary tools.
- delroth 5y agoThe Xilinx -7 series of FPGA is fairly well supported by SymbiFlow these days. https://symbiflow-examples.readthedocs.io/en/latest/building-examples.html#xilinx-7-series https://symbiflow-examples.readthedocs.io/en/latest/building...
- ivegotnoaccount 5y agoUnless it changed recently, I think it doesn't have full support for BRAM, and no support for BSP and hard blocks, right ? I wouldn't be surprised if some were used in the Mister project. (Doesn't change the fact that Stmbiflow is an impressive feat)
- snvzz 5y agoI don't know the state of Xilinx family 7 open source support, other than there has been work on it for years. A competitive chip that is well supported (including BRAM etc) is the Lattice ECP5, as found in e.g. the ULX3S dev board.
- snvzz 5y ago
- yholio 5y agoMinor nitpick with the website: what's with the subscribe overlay that can't be closed on mobile? it's so annoying i had to navigate away.
- caslon 5y ago> Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- jiggawatts 5y ago[flagged]
- caslon 5y agoThere's a place for it. Namely, the email of whoever wrote the piece. Not a discussion site. Spamming complaints on HN only serves to lower the quality of discussion.
- tomhoward 5y agoThe point is that ranting about it here can't directly fix the problem. Sure, it can keep the topic of accessible/usable web development in people's minds, but it likely already is for most web developers using this site. Where a specific page/site is concerned, the person to complain to is the operator of the site hosting the relevant content - i.e., the person/group who can actually do something about it.
- hutzlibu 5y agoThis seems like a bug, though. And this guideline is about general complaining about webdesign, where the design choices of the creators are not align with the users preferences.
- dang 5y agoBtw we made that guideline a bit more general recently: "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." I expect it can be generalized further still, but I wanted to make it unambiguously cover the generic flamewars about things like "why is this on Twitter instead of a blog", since those come up a lot and are super repetitive. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- moring 5y agoWhen it comes to the detailed timing and edge cases of hardware, especially peripheral hardware, software-based hardware emulators try to cover the most important cases. As far as I understand, an FPGA-based emulator would try to emulate the structure of the hardware, not its behaviour, thus resulting in more accurate emulation. Where do they plan to get information / documentation about the structure of the hardware? AFAIK most of the behavior is reverse-engineered by trial and error.
- city41 5y agoAt least in the case of the Neo Geo core, the chips were decapped and fully reverse engineered. I'm unsure about other cores. https://www.retrorgb.com/furrtek-demonstrates-decapping-process.html https://www.retrorgb.com/furrtek-demonstrates-decapping-proc...
- dehrmann 5y agoIf you're decapping old chips, do you even need to reverse engineer them, or can you just blindly convert a high-res photo to something an fpga can run?
- bstar77 5y agoIf you look up Robert Peip, he's detailing a huge amount of what he's doing as he builds his PSX core. It's a combination of work done on emulators, getting expert feedback on the MiSTer, previous work on supported chips and docs from where ever he can find them. It's pretty incredible, I've supported him on patreon for about a year and have been exposed to so much interesting work.
- ghastmaster 5y agoThe Mister Multisystem appears to be a great improvement over the de10-nano. LGR did a video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx45r-BRHxY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx45r-BRHxY https://rmcretro.store/multisystem-board-only/ https://rmcretro.store/multisystem-board-only/
- creamytaco 5y agoThe Mister ecosystem is based on open hardware / software, besides the FPGA which is a necessary evil (and can be replaced in the future). The "mister multisystem" (which is a proprietary design) comes across like a slap in the face. Don't support blatant opportunistic profiteering.
- rwmj 5y agoNo one is taking the ecosystem from you. This board is just one expansion option.
- gchadwick 5y agoThere's a fair few commercial sellers for MiSTer related stuff. Yes some just build existing open hardware designs, but not everything is open hardware. E.g. the MiSTercade https://misteraddons.com/products/mistercade https://misteraddons.com/products/mistercade or the MiSTer mini ITX Ironclad Plus https://www.d3fmod.com/mini-itx-ironclad-plus/ https://www.d3fmod.com/mini-itx-ironclad-plus/ None of these are trying to lock people into their solutions, they're just providing other options.
- NovemberWhiskey 5y agoThis plugs into the FPGA dev board, doesn't it?
- deelowe 5y agoYes. It still requires the nano.
- willis936 5y ago
- Epiphany21 5y agoThe general purpose computer cores are what interest me the most about the MiSTer project. I'm keeping an eye on the 486 PC and Macintosh Plus cores. Emulators are mostly fine for what I do but I would just love to have dedicated hardware instead. It's a shame the DE-10 Nano is out of stock everywhere...
- zdw 5y agoThe ao486 core is much improved since this article was published in 2019 - it's had caches and a VGA chipset added, which make most early 90's games playable to some extent.
- dehrmann 5y agoMight want to check out the Vortex86. Other than sound, it might support what you want.
- CyberDildonics 5y agoWhy do you want to emulate a 486 with an FPGA?
- staticman2 5y agoThe best thing about this project is the seemless CRT TV support. There is no simple way to use a PC emulator and support CRT output.
- willis936 5y agoSpecifically 15 kHz. If you're okay with rough approximations then 480p VGA will be okay. If you really want the original art then you need to bend over backwards to get the original, strange aspect ratios and non-square pixels. It is indeed nice to have a project that outputs authentic analog video signals.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y agoCan it do 3dfx?
- theodric 5y agoNo. And it can barely do anything without crashing. I hate mine.