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I _technically_ had prior knowledge as a computer architecture class had us stick some premade pieces together to create a CPU we designed, but I personally wro

by agg23 3y ago

I _technically_ had prior knowledge as a computer architecture class had us stick some premade pieces together to create a CPU we designed, but I personally wrote no Verilog, and it was a small subset of the class. I don't have much documentation for getting started with HDLs (Verilog, VHDL, etc), but I have tried to document my process as much as possible. I have primarily developed for the Analogue Pocket, so my documentation is themed towards that device, but there's IP (code modules) and wiki entries that would be useful for everyone: https://github.com/agg23/analogue-pocket-utils https://github.com/agg23/analogue-pocket-utils I had previously written a cycle accurate NES emulator, so I was familiar with hardware techniques, but not what they look like in circuits. The first core I wrote was a schematic accurate Pong implementation. This was both good and bad because it's very simple and has no CPU (and thus no code), but it also makes it very hard to tell what is going on. I went from there to doing a lot of ports (NES, SNES, PCE, and a few more), and after that I worked on my own cores (Tamagotchi, Game and Watch). Tamagotchi I took a very typical software approach where I wrote massive amounts of unit tests and wrote against those tests. While this is what real hardware developers do, I found it to be a huge waste of time when you're working by yourself on a small project. I, and a few others, are very willing to help people learn (though I'm still really a noob). If you want to play around in this space, let me know and I'll try to help you with what you need.

agg23 3y ago
On the note of my sibling comment, a common book in this space for learning is "Designing Video Game Hardware in Verilog", which is specifically retrocomputing related.
- 0xcafefood 3y ago
  I second this book recommendation! I just started it exactly to get a foothold on FPGA programming. It's very accessible.
  - lovelyviking 3y ago
    with what FPGA hardware is better to start for first tries?
    - Graziano_M 3y ago
      The book actually has an accompanying emulator where you can run everything in browser!
datameta 3y ago
My recommendation is the NAND2Tetris coursera course. You start with a single NAND gate and put together more complex gates building upon the previous abstraction. Part 1 covers things like creating Muxes, RAM, and an ALU in a stripped down HDL. Part 2 covers the software stack picking up after having created an assembler but I haven't taken it yet. Perhaps this is isn't tailor-made for jumping into FPGA fast but it helped fill in a lot of blanks for me coming from mostly software world.
lovelyviking 3y ago
I really wish to play with those things because I was playing with hardware when I was a schoolboy and found it back then very entertaining. I’ve built my first computer with soldering all the parts and then started debugging it with oscilloscope to see signals from chips and analyse them to find the problem. And in doing so I have quickly realised that I am missing something. This something was ‘How chips actually work’. Turned out it was called Digital electronics so I’ve decided to learn this on the way. My treasure and source of inspiration at school time was this book: Digital Electronics by Roger Tokheim. I was dragging it to school and back every day just like people cary notebooks these days. This was my bible back then. Boys in the school made fun of me for this. The book was amazing and I think it still is. I remember it all as very exciting time. Now FPGA seems like a nice opportunity to revisit all of this after many years of programming and developing a new point of view about many paradigms. May be you can direct me and others like me toward a good community and tips for shortening a learning curve. Possibly many things I am familiar with already and yet with FPGA I didn’t find a good/easy way to start so far. Perhaps you can advice something about ‘how’ and ‘were’ to begin.
- agg23 3y ago
  This is retrocomputing specific, but this Discord server (https://discord.gg/3wv3gMhp https://discord.gg/3wv3gMhp) has quite a few of the big devs in the FPGA gaming space, and they're more than willing to answer questions. They're what really got me going after I built my Pong core. I have always been a big advocate of learning while doing, especially in software. Find something, preferably small, that you want to build (your Pong), and work on making it a reality. Maybe it's making Snake entirely in HDL. Maybe it's playing around with LiteX on your preferred development platform so you can build something cool with the RISC-V processor (I don't suggest this though, start with learning a normal HDL). Maybe it's simply looking through one of the existing retrocomputing cores, trying to figure out how stuff ticks. Until you get to the CPU design level, the general concepts you'll encounter will be fairly simple. I think it's enough to just play around with blinking lights, learning how parallel synchronous logic works, relative to how we think of software working.
  - lovelyviking 3y ago

by agg23 3y ago

agg23 3y ago

On the note of my sibling comment, a common book in this space for learning is "Designing Video Game Hardware in Verilog", which is specifically retrocomputing related.

0xcafefood 3y ago
I second this book recommendation! I just started it exactly to get a foothold on FPGA programming. It's very accessible.
- lovelyviking 3y ago
  with what FPGA hardware is better to start for first tries?
  - Graziano_M 3y ago
    The book actually has an accompanying emulator where you can run everything in browser!

datameta 3y ago

My recommendation is the NAND2Tetris coursera course. You start with a single NAND gate and put together more complex gates building upon the previous abstraction. Part 1 covers things like creating Muxes, RAM, and an ALU in a stripped down HDL. Part 2 covers the software stack picking up after having created an assembler but I haven't taken it yet. Perhaps this is isn't tailor-made for jumping into FPGA fast but it helped fill in a lot of blanks for me coming from mostly software world.

lovelyviking 3y ago

I really wish to play with those things because I was playing with hardware when I was a schoolboy and found it back then very entertaining. I’ve built my first computer with soldering all the parts and then started debugging it with oscilloscope to see signals from chips and analyse them to find the problem. And in doing so I have quickly realised that I am missing something. This something was ‘How chips actually work’. Turned out it was called Digital electronics so I’ve decided to learn this on the way. My treasure and source of inspiration at school time was this book: Digital Electronics by Roger Tokheim. I was dragging it to school and back every day just like people cary notebooks these days. This was my bible back then. Boys in the school made fun of me for this. The book was amazing and I think it still is. I remember it all as very exciting time. Now FPGA seems like a nice opportunity to revisit all of this after many years of programming and developing a new point of view about many paradigms. May be you can direct me and others like me toward a good community and tips for shortening a learning curve. Possibly many things I am familiar with already and yet with FPGA I didn’t find a good/easy way to start so far. Perhaps you can advice something about ‘how’ and ‘were’ to begin.

agg23 3y ago
This is retrocomputing specific, but this Discord server (https://discord.gg/3wv3gMhp https://discord.gg/3wv3gMhp) has quite a few of the big devs in the FPGA gaming space, and they're more than willing to answer questions. They're what really got me going after I built my Pong core. I have always been a big advocate of learning while doing, especially in software. Find something, preferably small, that you want to build (your Pong), and work on making it a reality. Maybe it's making Snake entirely in HDL. Maybe it's playing around with LiteX on your preferred development platform so you can build something cool with the RISC-V processor (I don't suggest this though, start with learning a normal HDL). Maybe it's simply looking through one of the existing retrocomputing cores, trying to figure out how stuff ticks. Until you get to the CPU design level, the general concepts you'll encounter will be fairly simple. I think it's enough to just play around with blinking lights, learning how parallel synchronous logic works, relative to how we think of software working.
- lovelyviking 3y ago