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What is a good fpga starter board that's big enough to load this? It's not obvious from the repo as a complete novice in fpga land.
by mg794613 3y ago
What is a good fpga starter board that's big enough to load this?
It's not obvious from the repo as a complete novice in fpga land.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoAFAIK, an FPGA board is not enough, you also need the "compiled netlist" from the Verilog files, clock configuration and routing info, tailored to the specific FPGA/board you choose.
- mg794613 3y agomaking notes
- unixhero 3y agoThis is such a parallel universe of computing
- gaudat 3y agoAka the software that comes with the FPGA vendor. I think Intel, AMD, the Chinese vendors and some parts from Microchip have the software available for free.
- worewood 3y agoBefore intel acquired Altera they had some free (as in beer) software for it, helped me lots in grad as I could design, verify and simulate at home.
- bri3d 3y agoKinda, sorta? This is like saying "a computer is not enough, you need a binary." What's here is the source code in Verilog. Once this is compiled by a Verilog toolchain, this produces a netlist (set of gates) which is synthesized into an actual bitstream (proprietary gate configuration file) for a specific FPGA hosted on a specific board. In this case, the project isn't very documented but it looks like fairly generic Verilog without a lot of vendor specific extensions. So, what you need is a Verilog toolchain which can synthesize the source code into a netlist, and then into a bitstream, and the right set of extra code to target an actual physical piece of hardware. Right now, it looks like the only board support that's checked into the repository is for the Icarus Verilog simulation environment: https://github.com/nukeykt/Nuked-MD-FPGA/tree/main/icarus https://github.com/nukeykt/Nuked-MD-FPGA/tree/main/icarus . But, the overall setup looks pretty simple and generic, so it should (hopefully) be possible to synthesize to your board of choice by reimplementing run.v and memstubs.v towards an actual hardware configuration. Basically what you'd want to do to start trying to run this on real hardware is to build a hosting environment which wired the inputs and outputs from `md_board.v` into the real hardware provided in your environment, possibly by integrating other soft-IP (ie - you could attach a cartridge emulator of some sort to the cartridge lines, your choice of video encoder to the video output, and so on).
- rbanffy 3y ago> proprietary gate configuration file A fully open-source FPGA/CPLD and toolchain would be very disruptive. How hard would it be? It could be manufactured by any number of smaller foundries with older processes. No need for a 3nm node for this.
- bb88 3y agoI don't know the precise answer, but my guess is that it would be ported to the MiSTer or something like it. https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/#what-is-mister-fpga https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/#what-is-mister... The core of the MiSTer looks pretty beefy. https://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=English&No=1046 https://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=...
- jonny_eh 3y agoBut what would it offer over this? https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Genesis_MiSTer https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Genesis_MiSTer
- mikepavone 3y agoThe author is targeting the DE-10 Nano which is also used in MiSTer setups so that's probably the best choice
- photonerd 3y ago$300? Christ… I bought by MegaDrive+32X+MegaCD for less than that combined recently. Tho I’m glad this project exists that’s… a huge chunk of change for a 30 yr old console
- denkmoon 3y agoIt's tens-to-hundreds of 30 year old consoles though, https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/cores/console/ https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/cores/console/ but yes, it is fairly excessive if you just want to play games, emulation is absolutely "good enough" and even indistinguishable for most. We do it for the love of the hobby ;)
- jmcb 3y agoAlso, those original components have more than 25 years-old... They can fail anytime. DE10-nano is new hardware with new components which last other 25 years at least.
- photonerd 3y agoRealistically the only components that are likely to fail though are the capacitors, which are trivially replaced. While other parts CAN fail it’s physical damage that’s much more likely a problem
- photonerd 3y agoI didn’t think MiSTer was particularly concerned with accuracy like this project is? Just implementation on FPGA. Am I wrong there?
- 3y ago
- ConanRus 3y ago[dead]