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Recreating Voodoo Graphics and a Late-1990s Gaming PC on an FPGA
- functionmouse 17d agoWill it support 31kHz video out via VGA I wonder? Would love a period-accurate PC in my superstation one.
- mysterydip 17d agoI hadn’t thought of that possibility but it would indeed be fantastic!
- hexapus 17d agoI imagine it would...I haven't tried the core, but most of them maintain the original outputs over the VGA port. Even if, for some bizarre reason it didn't, you could just enable the vga_scaler and force it.
- crtified 17d agoThe core is available at github and should run fine on your SS1, afaik. Be aware it's an experimental core. https://github.com/nand2mario/z486_MiSTer https://github.com/nand2mario/z486_MiSTer There is also a recent fork by github user janisc which is developing a direct 31khz output. -- Speaking to general : To be clear, none of these MiSTer cores include the Voodoo graphics portion discussed in the parent link. I doubt that the degree of sheer hyper-optimisation required to get a Voodoo (plus the Pentium to make it meaningful!) into a DE10-Nano necessarily exists. Never-say-never, sure, but also, just-no - hahaha. That work is for higher specced boards like the Xilinx discussed.
- wk_end 17d agoTomb Raider (1996) ostensibly required a Pentium, and I remember (though memory may be faulty) the demo refusing to run on my 486. Does this FPGA 486 support the additional Pentium instructions?
- Zardoz84 17d agoI remember playing Star Fleet Academy demo on my 486DX5@133 and a Trident 3d SVGA card at slow motion in battles. The game requires a Pentium 75 or 90 and a DirectX accelerator.
- tsunamifury 17d agoWait wait. You’re one of the rare people to ever this odd period of 486 history. What kind of overclocker did you use?
- rasz 17d agoNot require, just recommends Pentium 60 minimum. Like Quake Tomb Raider loves pipelined FPU, 30 fps on Pentium 60 vs 15 fps on 486DX2@66 and 20 on DX4@100.
- tharkun__ 17d agoWhoa, you took me back quite a few years there! I really wanted a DX4@100 back then but it wasn't available in my area. I "had" to get a Pentium 60, which I was not happy about lol. Upgraded to a Pentium 200 MMX. Whoa! And then I also got a specific batch Celeron 300a to overclock. "Stole" my dad's Matrox Mystique, coz what does he need a "3D" card for? Played "Destruction Derby" a lot, just coz 3D card: https://archive.org/details/dd2matrox_19961205 https://archive.org/details/dd2matrox_19961205 Wow, the times!
- samuelec 17d agoIf I remember correctly the Pentium 60 was the one that had math rounding errors, isn't it? What a memory
- 0points 17d agoThis? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug > The FDIV bug affects the 60 and 66 MHz Pentium P5 800 in stepping levels prior to D1, and the 75, 90, and 100 MHz Pentium P54C 600 in steppings prior to B5. The 120 MHz P54C and P54CQS CPUs are unaffected.
- shoobiedoo 17d agoSo bummed out that I wrecked the HDMI out on my MiSTer. I was trying to figure out a new monitor layout and unplugged/plugged it in a few times. I could SSH into it no problem, but no HDMI out. After peeking around on the forums, turns out that the MiSTer doesn't take kindly to that while it's still on-- I forget the technical reason. Oh well. Many, many hours of fun playing games with my son on the it, I got my money's worth.
- hexapus 17d agoDunno which variant you bought, but the QMTech mister clones on Ali Express are affordable, work perfectly well, and come with the expanded 128MB SDRAM expansion and analog I/O board bundled up in a convenient case. I have 2 of them, along with the MiSTer Pi, and I'll probably pick up a couple more for dedicated applicaitons (3d-printed retro computer workstation, Normal/TATE mode cab builds, and a couple just to hook up to the CRTs I have lying around).
- shoobiedoo 17d agoErr I forget, it's the "real" one from Taiwan that was fairly expensive. Thank you for the tip though, I'd love to have one handy in the future.
- jakemauer 17d agoThat's crazy I would have never ever guessed that would be an issue. I'm interested in any forum links you can share.
- throwitaway222 17d agoI had that VooDoo card- Quake 1 was amazing on it. Of course today it's not amazing.
- matwood 17d agoI also had the original Voodoo card. It's rare to see a before and after divide in history so clearly. When I played Quake (and ran the time test) the first time on that Voodoo, I knew computer gaming had changed.
- xupybd 17d agoThe lack of example videos is killing me!
- jumploops 17d agoIn case it's helpful to anyone, MiSTer is a project[0] that recreates classic computers and video game consoles on hardware. What do I mean by hardware? Rather than emulating the device in software, which can cause various issues (especially related to timing), by mapping the actual device logic to a field programmable gate array (FPGA), you can achieve an "exact" replica of the hardware. It's a super cool project, and I highly recommend checking it out if you have an interest in old machines (Apple II, Commodore 64, etc.). [0]https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/ https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/
- utopiah 17d agoDamn there is a whole ecosystem around that, e.g. https://ultimatemister.com https://ultimatemister.com to buy it all built, very neat.
- MegaDeKay 17d agoCheck out the Superstation One [0]. Outer shell modelled after the original PS1. Optional optical disk dock. Simplified UI. Lots of outputs. Well priced. [0] https://retroremake.co/pages/superstation%E1%B5%92%E2%81%BF%E1%B5%89 https://retroremake.co/pages/superstation%E1%B5%92%E2%81%BF%... (Don't mind the strange characters in the URL above. That's a superscripted "one". Use https://retroremake.co/ https://retroremake.co/ if you feel better about that).
- utopiah 17d agoSuper cool! To be honest I'm not into emulation/retrogaming so much (even though I do have a Pimoroni Picade) but the fact that this exist as a production is very inspiring, thanks for sharing.
- unwind 17d agoDo note that this very cool project does not run on the "default" MiSTer hardware. This board is $250 from AMD.
- ggm 17d agoI'd run the Virtual Notre Dame VRML demo in this, if I could!
- Panzerschrek 17d agoAm I right that Voodoo had no early depth test and thus triangles are textured even if they are completely obstructed?
- djmips 17d agoIf you draw front to back that could handle some of that - it does have a Z buffer.
- account42 17d agoWithout an early Z test that would still do all the same calculations only to discard the fragment when it would be written to the frame buffer.
- rasz 17d agoThe only PC desktop accelerator that could be considered early depth testing would be tile based 1996 PowerVR. ATI introduced HyperZ in 2000 Radeon DDR (R100), Nvidia followed in 2001 with GeForce 3 LMA. From what I remember Radeon compressed Z gains were surprisingly minimal, like 10-20% when turning it on/off, but Im sure it became crucial later on when real shaders (2.0) started being used.
- jauntywundrkind 17d agoAmusingly, open source devs are still hacking/improving HyperZ support in 2026. https://www.phoronix.com/news/ATI-R300-Occlusion-Query-Fix https://www.phoronix.com/news/ATI-R300-Occlusion-Query-Fix The idea that we should ever allow companies to gate how we use hardware is a joke. The sustainability here is just wildly off the charts impressive. We as a species have blanket legal right to fix things we buy. Any legal monkeying that that from is us an affront to all of us, and if applicable whatever god or gods that made us.
- mitxela 17d agoThere's no good reason to get emotionally attached to obsolete hardware unless you are running a museum or just doing something cool. AMD doesn't hack on a Radeon R100 for the same reason everyone else doesn't: it's obsolete. It makes more sense to get a modern bargain-bin $30 fanless graphics card than to make your R100 work in any modern computer.
- monster_truck 17d agoI mowed lawns for two summers to save up for a Voodoo 3000 PCI, still didn't even have half of what I needed. Parents covered the rest. Basically nothing I had hoped to be able to play worked. Spent an entire summer just trying to get Arcanum to even run, never did succeed. Learned a whole lot. Goddamn if that buyer's remorse didn't scar me for life, the amount of researching I did before any purchase from then on was obsessive. I still think of the card fondly for what it represented to 10 year old me. This story does have a happy ending, we ended up getting a Dell XPS not long after with a Pentium 3 & a GeForce 2, back when they were still beige.
- crq-yml 17d agoThis is exactly how it was back then, roughly from when the 386-based PC clones appeared up through Windows 7. The best thing you could do was ask the local computer stores about what configurations they were building, since they got to see more hardware come through. But they struggled too. The system the store built for me in 2001 had an Athlon Thunderbird running 1.4GHz and cooling tech hadn't caught up so it hit the failsafe temps during long sessions of Counter-Strike and Serious Sam. Later, wiser me eventually figured out, two computers later, that the power supply was probably the culprit, but this wasn't much of a topic of discussion yet - power supply efficiency wasn't a priority in the 90's.
- mikeryan 17d agoFun Fact. My first “tech job” was tech support at EA in the late 90s. Serious Sam was the FPS of choice for late night LAN parties for the EA tech support and QA teams. Tech support and QA were shared resources. They’d shift people from support to QA in summer for fall/winter holiday releases and back to support around the holidays. Serious Sam was the one FPS that would run decently on our workstations. Long story but I got promoted to maintainer of the EA game tech support site which is what got me into coding.
- cjrp 17d agoI remember exactly that feeling; I had a cricket game where my PC met the minimum specs, but it ran terribly. That's the day I learned that minimum is not enough.
- userbinator 17d agoIt seems that within the past few years, there have been a great increase in the number of articles on low-level GPU internals/programming, which was previously a very niche subject. However, once you understand that a GPU is conceptually a processor specialised for graphics operations, with its own instruction set and RAM, then everything seems quite straightforward, and you can actually start thinking about how to implement one. The specification is a behavioral target, rather than a circuit diagram. Did anyone else get a slight feeling of LLM-ism from that sentence? Not a complaint, because I've noticed AI is definitely leading to some great boosts (the somewhat related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49717638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49717638 is on the front page as I write this.)
- kriro 17d agoThis is really cool at first glance and very HN worthy. I've bookmarked it and will look into it deeper. Recreates roughly my first PC setup though I think I had a Matrox Mystique so that makes it even more interesting. And I've been looking for a "I build something cool with an FPGA" kind of project to look into for a while now.
- doublerabbit 17d agoMyself as well, the itch for: "I want my own accelerated VGA adapter" is something that's been on my bucket list for a while. Something that can output video and this fits the bill. I'd rather make my own video pipeline than use existing and if this can render triangles and polygons, than that's all I need.
- eliauelkouby 17d ago[flagged]
- WorseIsBetter 17d ago[dead]
- unixhero 17d agoIf we get fpga aliexpress 486 laptops then I am selling all my retro x86 boxes