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There was a time price of DE10-Nano was somewhat close to BOM cost, like one should do with your DEV demo boards to encourage experimentation and part use. But
by rasz 2y ago
There was a time price of DE10-Nano was somewhat close to BOM cost, like one should do with your DEV demo boards to encourage experimentation and part use. But then people realized why design own product when we can just incorporate whole DEV board and here we are at >100% margin. Looks like this clone brings price back to those good old $100 times.
- Dylan16807 2y ago> Looks like this clone brings price back to those good old $100 times. On the one hand, good improvement. On the other hand, price and performance parity with a seven year old board containing a twelve year old chip? Oof.
- jonhohle 2y agoI put off buying one when they were cheap because it was already old enough to assume it would be replaced. Then nothing replaced it and the prices doubled. Now that the prices are reasonable again, I look at it and think, something better will replace this soon.
- awill 2y agoI'm in the same boat, but this will do up to n64. What else could you want? Dreamcast? PS2? Not sure it's just power, and probably so much complexity vs PSX/N64 that it won't be done for years.
- jonhohle 2y agoYeah, there’s not much hope of anything anytime soon. Between Analogue and Polymega I’m covered for those generations.
- vhold 2y agoOne of the primary FPGA developers a while back said that it's unlikely that the MisterFPGA project will evolve to a much larger FPGA anytime soon because it's an immense gap between the current most complex cores and the systems that come after it. Not only would it require a much larger FPGA, but writing the cores is becoming way more difficult.
- throwaway48476 2y agoThe complexity comes from chip designers gluing IP together instead of designing everyday in house.
- whitehexagon 2y agoThe good thing with stable hardware is that it is well understood, and for this task 'something better' isnt really required. I also hesitated with the de-10 nano, but plunged in anyway a few years ago, with the MiSTer sdram expansion and some usb daughter board thingy. Blew my mind! and took me right back to real arcade machines. No lag, dropped frames, or other rubbish we just take for granted these days. All I was missing was a decent control deck, but I held off thinking I'd eventually build a cabinet, one day maybe!
- bluescrn 2y agoWell, it’s mostly being used to simulate 30+ year old chips, so doesn’t need to be the latest and greatest
- foft 2y agoThere are a few improvements that could still be useful: i) FPGA on a newer process so it can clock higher. For faster 68k in the Amiga core and pentium 1 equivalent speeds in the x86 core. ii) Faster ARM chip and better ARM-FPGA fabric, opening up hybrid emulation. Currently the ARM-FPGA layer is a real bottleneck and also the ARM core is a little slow. iii) More spare IO to allow per-system custom io boards. iv) Built in IO/memory board so they can fit in a nicely designed case rather than the current eyesore.
- crtified 2y agoSome of those wishes may be addressed by the DE25 line, which is under investigation as a possible next-gen direction for MiSTer. As discussed in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Z0l9cLO0jA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Z0l9cLO0jA
- snvzz 2y ago>ii) Faster ARM chip and better ARM-FPGA fabric, opening up hybrid emulation. Currently the ARM-FPGA layer is a real bottleneck and also the ARM core is a little slow. I'd hope for replacement with the open standard RISC-V instead, as used in many of the newer FPGA families.
- Dylan16807 2y agoThe problem is that the FPGA is still priced similarly to when it was the latest and greatest.
- tecleandor 2y agoAll the FPGA based products went up like crazy in price during COVID. Dreamcast ODEs like GDEMU clones went from ~45€ to over 100€, surpassing sometimes the price of one of the (almost never available) original. Or DCHDMIs over 200 or even 300€. I know FPGAs got expensive during that time, but not THAT expensive. I hope there are new generations of that kind of accessories done with low cost RPi Picos and the like...