Another World / Out Of This World

[pgimeno]

Hard to tell what's the adequate forum for this, so I apologize if this is the wrong one.

I've just learned that the videogame Another World (called Out Of This World in the U.S.) was created using a virtual machine with a custom assembler-like language.

The language, described here: http://www.anotherworld.fr/anotherworld ... _world.htm, contains of course some high-level instructions to manage resources, play sounds and that sort of things, that the interpreter takes care of. One can reasonably guess that these characteristics make it unsuitable for a hardware implementation, right?

Well, if you guessed that, guess again. Here's an FPGA implementation of Another World's VM: https://github.com/felipesanches/AnotherWorld_FPGA

Not sure what device(s) it's designed for, though. But a port to MiSTer would be great, don't you think?

[jca]

Not sure what device(s) it's designed for, though. But a port to MiSTer would be great, don't you think?

ulx3s

[Moondandy]

This could be pretty neat, would it be a simple port?

[cathrynmataga]

Hard to tell what's the adequate forum for this, so I apologize if this is the wrong one.

Good post, this is an appropriate forum for this. Intereting news, I did not know this.

[blacklistedcard]

Looks like the FPGA version needs the DOS version files. It would be cool if we could use the 20th university version with the FGPA implementation.

[fsanches]

hi there!

I'm the owner of that repo with the hardware description of the Another World VM for FPGAs.

It is not in a fully working state, as I am not super skilled in FPGA development. But I was able to get some good results for byte-code execution. The video buffer is not yet properly working and there's no implementation of the polygon rendering or sound playback or user input algorithms yet. I only implemented the instruction set for now.

I have successfully reimplemented this same VM in the past for the MAME project, and it was perfecly working, even though it was not merged into the upstream repo because it was deemed out-of-scope, as MAME only emulates "real hardware".

If anybody here with more FPGA development knowledge would like to join me, it would be delightful to collaborate with the knowledge I have about the VM.

I was brought here by a comment on the issue tracker of that repo:
https://github.com/felipesanches/Anothe ... A/issues/1

cheers,
Felipe Sanches

[Phaedrus]

It looks like some progress has been made: https://github.com/felipesanches/Anothe ... 1097119365

[Phaedrus]

https://fabiensanglard.net/another_worl ... index.html

Some good technical info here. Still have hope this core could be ported.

[seastalker]

I LOVE this game and non-apologetically love the sequel.

[badvision]

hi there!

I'm the owner of that repo with the hardware description of the Another World VM for FPGAs.

It is not in a fully working state, as I am not super skilled in FPGA development. But I was able to get some good results for byte-code execution. The video buffer is not yet properly working and there's no implementation of the polygon rendering or sound playback or user input algorithms yet. I only implemented the instruction set for now.

I have successfully reimplemented this same VM in the past for the MAME project, and it was perfecly working, even though it was not merged into the upstream repo because it was deemed out-of-scope, as MAME only emulates "real hardware".

If anybody here with more FPGA development knowledge would like to join me, it would be delightful to collaborate with the knowledge I have about the VM.

I was brought here by a comment on the issue tracker of that repo:
https://github.com/felipesanches/Anothe ... A/issues/1

cheers,
Felipe Sanches

You might want to look at some of Jotego's work. One of his contributions (among many things) is his team's set of cores that allows creating more portable cores and a framebuffer implementation that can work with several cores. https://github.com/jotego/jtcores. There's also a discord server you can reach him on, though I wouldn't be too surprised if he's around on this forum as well.

Thanks for all your hard work and good luck!
-Brendan