6 ms·
Ao486_MiSTer: i486 core for the MiSTer FPGA gaming system
- natas 4y agocan it run crysis?
- idonotknowwhy 4y agoOnly Dino Crisis (psx core)
- choonway 4y agono, but it can certainly run Windows NT.
- anthk 4y agoNo but it could run a Game Boy Color emulator with great 2D/2.5D action games such as Daikatana, Metal Gear:Ghost Babel, Indiana Jones... and a Z-macine (text adventures) interpreter with Spider and Web, Anchorhead... among a DOS build of Slashem.
- grishka 4y agoNo but it certainly can run Doom
- noncoml 4y agoIs DE-10 Nano back in stock?
- itsagavin 4y agoMy understanding is you order it from the manufacturer. They for the past couple years have claimed a lead time of 4-6 weeks but consistently shipped in 10 days or so. No idea the current situation.
- etiam 4y agoLooks like it's improved slightly then? They're estimating shipment by the end of the month at the moment. https://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=English&CategoryNo=205&No=1046&PartNo=8#contents https://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=...
- MegaDeKay 4y agoOrdering from Terasic will get you a board much quicker than waiting for one to show up at a distributor like Digikey given the current supply situation. Shipping times from Terasic also tend to be much quicker than they quote on their site. However, their shipping charges are quite steep, and you might get hit with duties as well.
- mk_stjames 4y agoI've written some small CPU cores in Verilog and used Logisim to design some small FPGA circuits but I can't fathom writing out an entire 486. Any info on what sort of project management or automation tools are being used to generate all this Verilog? Because this is literally tens thousand+ lines to define the functionality of a 486 and I can't imagine someone writing out register tables and kept track of naming and the pipelining all by hand. I'm guessing something like Vivado or some other IDE is used to help manage everything? I can't tell from the source in RTL. I find this use of FPGAs to replicate older CPUs/SOCs fascinating.
- userbinator 4y agoBased on the .q* files, I'm pretty sure it's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quartus_Prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quartus_Prime
- anewhnaccount2 4y agoThere is a file generated by Quartus at https://github.com/alfikpl/ao486/blob/df6eba123654fdf3e3058c6129d605ce1393e0db/syn/components/sd_card/slow_mem_hw.tcl https://github.com/alfikpl/ao486/blob/df6eba123654fdf3e3058c... I'm not sure, but it does seem mostly manual. I tend to agree that RTL is somehow particularly mind numbing. I would guess that in order to keep track of things you may have a large block diagram on paper beforehand.
- sweetjuly 4y agoMany companies do just write entire modern SoCs in straight Verilog (maybe with some autogenerated Verilog hacked in there) with no other major organization tools aside from the typical project management stuff. The load-store unit of a modern CPU alone easily exceeds 10k lines of Verilog. It's a similar thing as people who work with kernels—after all, the page table management code in a modern operating system like Linux is absolutely monstrous but still people are able to understand it well enough to be able to make the changes they need and get out. If you are interested in other languages which hope to make this sort of stuff easier, I'd recommend taking a look at design productivity languages like Chisel and it's associated Chipyard [1], SpinalHDL [2], and Bluespec [3]. Each of these are meant to make defining extremely complex hardware more manageable for humans and there's a lot of interesting work going on right now with each of them. [1] https://github.com/ucb-bar/chipyard https://github.com/ucb-bar/chipyard [2] https://github.com/SpinalHDL/SpinalHDL https://github.com/SpinalHDL/SpinalHDL [3] https://github.com/B-Lang-org/bsc https://github.com/B-Lang-org/bsc
- nzoschke 4y agoCould you run old demos like Future Crew / Second Reality on this? I’m always thinking about ways to capture old demoscene stuff in high quality video.
- itsagavin 4y agoI don't see why not its basically a 386/33 performance wise. Why not just use PCem + OBS? If you go the mister route, the $50 capture box from EVGA works a dream. I'm able to get simultaneous component and HDMI using the analog add-on board. I run the HDMI out to a splitter then one output to HDMI>VGA for CRT monitor. The remaining HDMI cable to a capture box and pass through to my desk monitor. Lastly component in to a CRT TV. It all just works, at the same time.
- anthk 4y agoPCEM it's far less compatible than an FPGA and maybe even DOSBOX-X in lots of cases. Also, it requires a huge machine.
- wang_li 4y agoI can run 2n Reality in pcem on a jetson xavier nx with gravis sound. May be less compatible, but for things of 1993 era, it doesn't take that much machine.
- qbasic_forever 4y agoBe sure to check out the old Mind Candy DVDs, they did a phenomenal job capturing demos to DVD and a blu-ray: http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
- dlevine 4y agoWouldn't it be a 486 SX-33 if there is no FPU?
- tyingq 4y agoThat's what the project they pulled this from (ao486) says: "The ao486 is an x86 compatible Verilog core implementing all features of a 486 SX" https://github.com/alfikpl/ao486 https://github.com/alfikpl/ao486
- nicolas_t 4y agoI've played with it and it's almost perfect from a game preservation perspective except for one glaring feature missing, many old cd games used to read the audio tracks of cds but the ao486_mister doesn't support this. So a lot of games from the exodos collection that would be perfect for this will crash when they attempt to read the audio track.
- anthk 4y agoUse a BIN/CUE format for these games.
- nicolas_t 4y agoEven with bin/cue format, last I tried, it didn't support audio tracks. See this forum thread that talks about it. https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?t=2189 https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?t=2189 It might have changed but I haven't seen anything about that in the change log and the repo still says "Currently only data portion of CD is supported. "
- anthk 4y agoAh, sorry then. At least it parses the CUE files fine. Playing audio CD is shouldn't be a "big" task at all, basically you sent bits from the faked CD drive to the sound card. https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/~checkout~/src/usr.bin/cdio/cdio.c?rev=1.84&content-type=text/plain https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/~checkout~/src/usr... Implementing the whole fake unit reading the media would be the most difficult task by far.
- nicolas_t 4y agoI haven't looked into it but what might be complicated is implementing the support for audio cd in the vhdl of the sound card component...
- nbernard 4y agoFor those who have not heard of the "MiSTer FPGA gaming system" before: "MiSTer is an open project that aims to recreate various classic computers, game consoles and arcade machines, using modern hardware. It allows software and game images to run as they would on original hardware, using peripherals such as mice, keyboards, joysticks and other game controllers. MiSTer utilizes an FPGA board called the 'DE10-Nano', which connects to your TV or monitor via HDMI video out. It can additionally be expanded with various add-ons (such as a USB hub, SDRAM, audio and VGA out)." (from: https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Wiki_MiSTer/wiki https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Wiki_MiSTer/wiki)
- xattt 4y agoMy understanding is that these are unobtanium now, and that the only reason it took off was the first boards were heavily subsidized by Intel.
- mmastrac 4y agoThe prices on eBay seem to be about 2x what I paid in 2021. Wild.
- Cpoll 4y agoTerasic still sells them. The price is much worse than when MiSTer was taking off, but my gut feeling is the project's picked up enough inertia that it doesn't matter. See: https://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=English&CategoryNo=167&No=1046 https://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=... Kit-sellers like Misteraddons also get them back in stock regularly. Reviews on their site suggest they shipped out a batch last month.
- anthk 4y agoWith two of these in parallel in a board, could it be possible to simulate a Pentium MMX? The step would be huge. Enough to play MP3s/OGGs and even some OPUS files, MPEG video support, i686 compatible GNU/Linux (and non-GNU) distros too...
- avidphantasm 4y agoPentium was 586, so would 686 Linux still work on that?
- monocasa 4y agoPentium was 586, but Pentium MMX was 686.
- avidphantasm 4y agoNo, P6 started with Pentium Pro, which originally didn’t have MMX.
- monocasa 4y agoOh, my bad, you're absolutely right. I had those flipped in my head.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- wkat4242 4y agoThe MiSTer is so cool, I wish I could just buy one though, with the whole kit. It seems impossible or extremely expensive. I hope this will improve as the component shortage subsides.