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OpenFPGA
- junaru 3y agoSo how is this different from MiSTer FPGA [1]? [1] https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/ https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/
- multiplied 3y agoYou can't carry a MiSTer in your Pocket, but you can Dock a Pocket. It doesn't support a few power-hungry systems supported by MiSTer. MiSTer doesn't support OG physical carts.
- fayalalebrun 3y agoWhat about the actual FPGA specs? Is it more power efficient per LUT? A newer generation or the same generation but a smaller chip?
- ndiddy 3y agoThe Pocket has an FPGA from the same series as the MiSTer, but it's a lower-end model that's optimized more for power consumption. Most notably, it's missing the 800 MHz ARM core (meaning that it runs a custom "OS" off of a microcontroller rather than Linux like the MiSTer), and it has a bit less than half the amount of logic elements. This means that 16-bit console emulation is about the highest you can go on the Pocket, while the MiSTer can emulate the Playstation, Saturn, and N64.
- paulhart 3y agoI’ve pasted the specs below, but in my opinion the biggest difference is that the OpenFPGA - in its Analogue Pocket form - is an end-user friendly target. MiSTer is more “enthusiast-friendly” with more options and upgrades (including an recommended add-on to the basic kit). MiSTer “tech specs”: Intel/Altera Cyclone V SE (5CSEBA6U23I7) FPGA SoC with 110,000LE (41,500ALM) and 5,570Kbit of Block RAM. ARM Cortex A9 dual-core CPU at 800MHz. HDMI video and audio allowing easy connectivity to any modern monitor/TV. 1GB of DDR3 RAM that is directly available to both ARM and FPGA. High-speed ARM <-> FPGA interconnect due to both being in the same chip. OpenFPGA specs: Intel/Altera Cyclone V FPGA 49K logic elements and 3.4Mbit BRAM Intel/Altera Cyclone 10 15K logic elements 2x independently addressable 16MB cellular RAM (128Mbit x 16) 32MB low latency memory 1x synchronous DRAM 64MB (32Mbit x 16) 1x asynchronous SRAM 256KB (128Kbit x 16)
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- lagrange77 3y agoThe name is a bit misleading.
- nereye 3y agoIt also seems to re-use the name of a (from what I can tell) separate project: https://github.com/lnis-uofu/OpenFPGA https://github.com/lnis-uofu/OpenFPGA https://openfpga.readthedocs.io/en/master/ https://openfpga.readthedocs.io/en/master/
- q3k 3y agoYeah, it makes no sense. It's like naming a TV remote 'OpenMicrocontroller'.
- gchadwick 3y agoI think it's a bit rich to describe this as the 'future of video game preservation'. The MiSTer project https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Wiki_MiSTer/wiki https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Wiki_MiSTer/wiki more rightfully deserves that title. It's got a huge range of systems (across consoles, arcade and micro computers) and it's all GPL licenced. The base board is a Terasic DE10 Nano which is proprietary but all other hardware required is open source. The MiSTeX project aims to make MiSTer portable across different FPGA platforms https://github.com/MiSTeX-devel https://github.com/MiSTeX-devel so a DE10 Nano won't be mandatory enabling a new ecosystem of open hardware and commercial for profit solutions. I take no issue with people wanting to make money in this space. I take great issue with trying to gatekeep system preservation behind a mostly closed system you stamp an 'open' moniker on.
- DrNosferatu 3y agoAbsolutely 0 mentions of the word "MiSTer" negatively impacts this "open" project. Their self-appraising pitch applies more to the MiSTeX project than themselves. [https://github.com/MiSTeX-devel https://github.com/MiSTeX-devel]
- pipes 3y agoYeah but they seem to be suggesting no one has done fpga emulation before. (I'm biased, I love my mister!)
- jonhohle 3y agoAfter DE-10 Nanos what up in price (likely due to MiSTer), there was rumblings that it was too tied to the hardware to be portable. I missed out when things were cheap and always assumed buying a board at the higher prices would be the trigger which caused the project to move to the next generation of hardware.
- pipes 3y agoYeah I paid the higher price unfortunately. The best thing about it is I don't spend all my time fiddling with settings like I do with software emulators.
- dark-star 3y agoI wish people would stop treating FPGAs as the Second Coming of the Lord or whatever. It is really not. It's emulation, plain and simple. Not bettero or worse than software emulators. It usually lags behind the pure software emulators because there are fewer devs and because emulating stuff in hardware is harder than emulating stuff in software. Just because it's in hardware doesn't mean that it is "better" or "more accurate".
- grapescheesee 3y agoIsn't it hardware emulation, built with software?
- 15457345234 3y agoYou're getting into the weeds and will get different answers based on semantics, here. A FPGA emulation isn't inherently better than a CPU-based emulation of any given chip; it's not more authentic because it still lacks the particular quirks of any old CPU that are associated with the way the hardware was laid out, path lengths, imperfections etc. I'm glad it's introducing FPGA programming to a wider audience because FPGAs are probably going to become more important going forward - and are probably going to be what keeps Intel alive - but it doesn't make the emulator inherently better.
- 15155 3y agoIntel is years behind Xilinx in tooling and high-end offerings and shows no signs of ever catching up.
- 15457345234 3y ago> shows no signs of ever catching up Personally I think that company's going, the only question is how long is it going to take...
- astrange 3y agoMany people think an FPGA is automatically accurate emulation because it's "hardware" and the original console is "hardware". But the FPGAs are based on C software emulators because that's where all the knowledge in the world of how to emulate the original system is kept. You can't translate original hardware to Verilog and skip the figuring out how it works process.
- bowsamic 3y agoThat's a huge amount of marketing effort with very little actual answers to basic questions such as "why is this the future of video game preservation?" Seems like a hype-based product
- sebastianconcpt 3y agoWhy hype-based? Isn't an easy to use vintage experience device a legitimate value proposition within itself?
- bowsamic 3y agoIt's a value proposition in the sense that it already exists and people want it, but it's nothing new. Cheap handheld emulator devices have existed for literally decades. The "hype-based" aspect is that they're pretending like it's something revolutionary, hence why they are leaning on this Teenage Engineering-esque marketing style.
- BrazeBeefNoodle 3y agoThis isn't really new (it came out a couple of years ago), but as far as I know it was the first handheld FPGA emulator available. There's debate in this thread about whether FPGA emulation is better or more accurate. In my experience it is, especially in recreation of sound as I remember it from back when these games were new.
- sebastianconcpt 3y agoBeing new is not mandatory for a business. Being valuable is. I'll go to a restaurant in a bit and I can't care less about how new it is but, hey it's convenient!
- Someone 3y agoSo, what happens if this particular FPGA no longer can be bought? Isn’t it more likely it will be possible to compile and run current C code on 22nd century hardware (possibly on some virtualization solution) than that it will be possible to compile and run FPGA code on 22nd century hardware?
- johnfernow 3y agoI agree. For me, one of the challenging long term parts of video game preservation will be non-standard controllers and other peripherals, such as the Wii remote, Wii balance board, Guitar Hero/Rock Band guitars and drums, etc. Sure, technically you can use a mouse and keyboard for some of those, but it’s fundamentally an entirely different experience from the original. The Wii came out over 17 years ago and third party companies still make controllers for them. Maybe that will still be the case 40 years after release, but eventually nearly all Wii consoles will stop working. Will there always be a big enough market of people playing Wii games on emulators to justify making those controllers and peripherals? I hope so, but am not sure. There near certainly won’t be enough demand for 3rd party Wii balance boards, which I can honestly live with, but I do hope the main controllers themselves are still available for purchase or possible to make out of other hardware available in the future.
- bogantech 3y ago> So, what happens if this particular FPGA no longer can be bought? The same code can be easily target another FPGA as long as you don't use any vendor specific primitives or IP cores
- cm2187 3y agoI agree, this is tying the video game to a more recent hardware, which will also disappear in its own time. Much better to have a full software emulation that can be ported / recompiled to newer CPUs and new OS.
- markemer 3y agoVerilog is just a logic implementation. It should be pretty portable. There are some issues, and certainly the bitstreams won’t be compatible, but if C still works, I imagine verilog would too.
- ageitgey 3y ago(2022) - I don't think there is anything new here since this was announced two years ago. FWIW, OpenFPGA on the Analogue Pocket works pretty well. Many of the most popular MiSTer cores were ported over and there are some nice desktop tools to make it easy to configure [1]. [1] https://github.com/neil-morrison44/pocket-sync https://github.com/neil-morrison44/pocket-sync
- sgtgrumbles 3y agoWow, that looks useful! Out of curiosity, I scanned the latest Windows release (4.5.0) with VirusTotal and it reported several malware hits. I realize I could manually audit the source code and build an .exe from scratch but do you think the release hosted on GitHub is malicious? See https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/7695a53b129c4e46eaf60cb0531fbdf510a42200cd597627cf0dbec659c468ed/detection https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/7695a53b129c4e46eaf60cb0... for the VirusTotal report.
- ageitgey 3y agoThere's a note on the README about false positives from virus scanners on Windows, so maybe that is all it is. But I can't speak to it beyond that. I've only used the Mac OS version.
- fayalalebrun 3y agoI am surprised no one has yet tried to make a portable shell for the DE-10 Nano (Mister-FPGA's target platform). With a power usage of 10 watts, I think it should be quite feasible even with the addition of a small LCD panel. However, it would probably require re-engineering some of the standard addon boards for the form factor.
- gchadwick 3y agoThey have https://youtu.be/8eAgjgbZyPw?si=ZIBEFLOc_13hitGp https://youtu.be/8eAgjgbZyPw?si=ZIBEFLOc_13hitGp Though sadly it's remained a prototype. I think the issue they had was you needed to mod the DE10 Nano (remove the pin headers and I think the ethernet jack) to fit it into the portable form factor. So they had concerns with either selling it in kit form where people had to do the mods themselves to expensive boards or doing it in house and effectively reselling modded DE10s. A fully custom board would be the solution but then price is a big issue. The DE10 Nano is very cheap vs its BOM cost at catalogue prices.
- CivBase 3y agoEven if this were the future of emulation, we need a lot more than emulators for anything to really be considered the "future of video game preservation". Modern games so frequently require connections to servers - often needlessly. For example, Ubisoft is shutting down the servers for 2014's The Crew on March 31, 2024. That's less than 10 years after release. When the servers are shut down, the entire game will stop working - including the lengthy single player campaign. No emulator will bring that game back from the dead. In a similar story, Square Enix recently announced that they will be shutting down Nier: Reincarnation's servers in April 2024, less than just 3 years after its worldwide release in 2021. And yes, it's a single player game. My wife is a fan of the Nier franchise and has been playing Nier: Reincarnation since it's release. In a couple months she'll never be able to play it again. Square also pulled the plug on Babylon's Fall in 2023, less than just 1 year after it's 2022 release. If you're concerned about game preservation, be prepared for the disaster coming soon. FPGAs won't be enough.
- cybrox 3y agoWhile this is being done intentionally now, it has been an issue for over a decade. - And it hasn't kept people from preserving these games in the slightest. Even now, there is a lot of work being put into reviving games that required master servers etc. by means of reverse engineering and essentially cracking. I do however agree with you that this is not the way it should I be and I still think developers and publishers should be legally bound to either allow software that they sell to function indefinitely or release the server code when they shut down the official servers.
- CivBase 3y agoI think "in the slightest" may be a bit of an exaggeration. Not every game with a required server connection has been resurrected. And as this problem continues to escalate, I'm doubtful that hackers and preservationists will be able to keep up.
- jonhohle 3y agoI play Overwatch with my sons and not only can you not run a personal server, the game frequently has fundamental mechanic changes for certain characters (and all characters in this Tuesday’s update). The Overwatch of a year ago is a very different game than is now or will be a year from now. If someone was to provide an Open Overwatch server, I don’t even know what it would look like at this point since game clients aren’t available for particular versions (maybe on PC, but not console). When Microsoft is done with Overwatch it’ll be gone.
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- HtmlProgrammer 3y agoI purchased the Analogue Pocket and it’s a great little device. Got an archive of all GB and GBC games and can play them off an SD card using some of the FPGA cores available. while expensive, it’s great to have that tactile feel just like an original gameboy with modern quality of life features
- nottorp 3y agoThat's illegal isn't it? And it's Nintendo's intellectual property so you shouldn't admit it in public :)
- jonhohle 3y agoIm sure he owns properly licensed copies of all those games. He’s just format shifting /s
- HtmlProgrammer 3y agoI’m not even a real person so good luck catching me
- nottorp 3y agoSo is this really "open"? Or as open as OpenAI? The web site looks like your average ex-googler's SaaS startup so I'm sceptic. Hoping people who are more in the emulation scene will clear things up.
- snvzz 3y agoWhat exactly is "open" about this?
- willis936 3y agoThe cores that are community contributed can be open source. The hardware and tooling are not open, so it doesn't meet most people's definition of open. On the spectrum it's much closer to being open than closed source emulation products that first parties distribute. Is MiSTer considered open? It's dependent on a closed source toolchain to generate the bytestream.
- snvzz 3y agoSo it is only open in the sense of commercially (for profit) taking advantage of pre-existing open HDL written by third-parties. Disgusting.
- willis936 3y agoNo. You need to explicitly request the tooling from the for-profit company (Analogue, which wraps Intel/Altera) so that the open source cores you write can run on their closed source hardware. It sounds exactly like the situation with MiSTer, except that there is a second for-profit middleman. Afaik MiSTer cores can't run on open source hardware or compile on open source toolchains. It's really a matter of taste whether you like Intel more than Intel+Analogue. It's wrong to call MiSTer an open source project but openFPGA not just because the number of for-profit companies needed is different.
- markemer 3y agoYeah. Open toolchains have come a long way, but they’re not there yet. The Lattice ICE family are the best supported.
- snvzz 3y agoYou're probably thinking iCE40. Note ECP5 and Nexus support is similarly good by now, and these families have larger FPGAs better suitable for miSTer cores. There's now also some support for GW1N/GW2N FPGA families from China. These have the advantage of being relatively quite cheap, and I hear they have FPGAs with 250k+ LBs coming, with RISC-V hard cores built in.
- FPGAhacker 3y agoI think this is not a great name for a product that isn’t developing silicon.
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y agoLol, the audacity of a for profit company with a proprietary and closed source stack
- opisthenar84 3y agoI fail to see how programmable logic patched together == "the future of video game preservation". There's community, software, testing, etc... involved as well.
- indrora 3y agoJust a reminder that Analogue have made very little on their promises to those they stole time from. Analogue isn't even the only ones to do an FPGA rebuild of a console; there's a near-perfect GB/GBC clone (with quirks toggles) that fits into a traditional Gameboy shell: https://funnyplaying.com/products/fpgbc-kit https://funnyplaying.com/products/fpgbc-kit
- snvzz 3y ago>Just a reminder that Analogue have made very little on their promises to those they stole time from. Please elaborate. These events are important to document.
- indrora 3y agoThe developer of mGBA wrote about it: https://endrift.com/2021/12/13/analogue-pocket-hate-story/ https://endrift.com/2021/12/13/analogue-pocket-hate-story/ Some relevant excerpts: > The next conversation unfortunately only brought more red flags. The first hint of impacting mGBA development had dropped: suddenly they were talking about delaying an mGBA release for a nebulous amount of time, directly contrary to what had been discussed prior. [...] The next conversation was suddenly about delaying until after the Pocket was released. At no point was such a thing discussed prior, but it was worded like it was. This was explained as putting a little bit of extra time after the release, though the reason was left implied; presumably they didn’t want mGBA stealing the Pocket’s thunder, as though that were at all a realistic scenario. And the amount of extra time proposed? Six months. > By now it was clear to me that they didn’t respect me at all and there was no truth to the claim of the job not impacting my open source work. It all seemed to point to them seeing me as a source of cheap labor and then didn’t care at all how it impacted me, so long as I did the work for them. [It] really reflects on how little Analogue seems to actually care about the retro emulation community as a whole. In conversations with other emulator developers over the past it was spelled out that kevtris thinks of FPGA-based hardware emulation as inherently superior to software emulation, and is plenty willing to keep research he does towards the goal of perfecting his hardware solutions private, all while claiming that not only is it not even emulation (with an asterisk of course), it’s also the only route to perfect emulation. Neither of these claims is true. > When I asked kevtris if he would release all of the documentation he had on GB/GBA he had said yes, after the Pocket shipped, but I’ve yet to see him release any of the documentation he’d promised for other projects, such as SNES, which have had products on the market for years now. The most I’ve seen is extremely basic overviews of a handful of obscure GBA behavior that, while valuable, is assuredly a tiny fraction of what he has. The emulator writer scene lives on back-chatter. Analogue isn't even the only one... ask some developers what they think of RetroArch, who simply bundle up emulator cores... You won't get pretty answers.
- dansalvato 3y agoI recently bought an Analogue Pocket and I think it's a great piece of hardware, but I'm really not a fan of this company's business model. This page has told me nothing I actually want to know about OpenFPGA. Here's my question: If I'm developing an FPGA core, why should I develop for OpenFPGA instead of MiSTer? I want to know why it's better for preservation that I develop for OpenFPGA. Is it a more portable platform that has a more guaranteed future? I need to be convinced that OpenFPGA solves problems that make it a more likely choice than MiSTer 10+ years from now. If someone with more experience than me in this space can answer the above, I would be really grateful. I'm astounded that Analogue's page on OpenFPGA is all marketing fluff without actually answering this.
- snvzz 3y agoBecause it's open. Except there's nothing open about it. It uses "open" in the name, to try and confuse people into doing unpaid work for them. I am hopeful the overlap between the levels of naivety needed and ability to do digital design will be non-existent.
- terrycody 3y agoDoes anyone konw the hardware changes in later versions lead to game crash rumor true or not?