MiSTer FPGA Forum

KremlingKuthroat19 wrote: ↑Tue Aug 30, 2022 3:37 am Regarding hybrid emulation, even if it did work, imo it would kind of defeat the purpose of FPGA. The goal for FPGA imo is to 100% replicate the hardware in HDL to preserve for future generations.

pgimeno wrote: ↑Wed Aug 31, 2022 1:10 pm
[...] Every core that uses a Z80, for example, is using the T80 module which is a recreation not based on the original hardware.

Hodor wrote: ↑Wed Aug 31, 2022 2:49 pm Out of curiosity, why is that? Is not the actual Zilog Z80 currently decapped and traced?

ToothbrushThreepwood wrote: ↑Wed Aug 31, 2022 10:22 am

KremlingKuthroat19 wrote: ↑Wed Aug 31, 2022 2:58 am

rhester72 wrote: ↑Tue Aug 30, 2022 11:49 pm There is about zero chance a board at the DE-10's price point will support N64 in decades. The clocks just aren't there.

Decades is an absurdly hyperbolic take. The FPGA industry is growing by leaps and bounds because of machine learning. To think that Moore’s Law applies to everything but FPGAs is beyond silly.

Robert Piep mentioned it may be just a few years away on his interview with Arduino earlier this year and he certainly knows more than me. Btw, the MiSTer is over 5 years old now. I have a hard time believing FPGA technology will be the same 5-10 years from now.

Hopefully that’ll change, but even if the performance and price is feasible, developer productivity doesn’t scale with Moore’s law, while the number of work hours required to implement the advanced systems a new platform allows probably do.

Hodor wrote: ↑Wed Aug 31, 2022 2:49 pm

pgimeno wrote: ↑Wed Aug 31, 2022 1:10 pm
[...] Every core that uses a Z80, for example, is using the T80 module which is a recreation not based on the original hardware.

Out of curiosity, why is that? Is not the actual Zilog Z80 currently decapped and traced?

KremlingKuthroat19 wrote: ↑Tue Aug 30, 2022 3:37 am Regarding hybrid emulation, even if it did work, imo it would kind of defeat the purpose of FPGA. The goal for FPGA imo is to 100% replicate the hardware in HDL to preserve for future generations. A hybrid approach opposes this.

In case anyone missed it, Robert's secret core is the N64! Of course expectations still need to be in check but he's gonna give it a go! Even if some workarounds need to be in place to make it happen it'll be cool to have it.

https://twitter.com/AzumFpg?ref_src=tws ... de%3Dfalse

https://www.patreon.com/FPGAzumSpass

Well that topic aged poorly.

It did and I'm really happy about it. I do expect some hack ao486 and PSX style for the core to get it to full N64 speed though, but I don't mind! As long as the visible in game accuracy is 99% there. I think it is fair to say that after the PSX core, we can trust him to deliver.

the_importer wrote: ↑Sat Apr 15, 2023 7:21 pm

Well that topic aged poorly.

Bit early to say that yet, even Robert himself said that he's not sure if it's possible on the current DE-10 nano.

But either way, the foundational work here will mean that an N64 core will basically be ready to go as soon as we get a viable successor to the DE-10 nano, so it's still very exciting either way.

dcubed wrote: ↑Sat Apr 22, 2023 9:12 am

the_importer wrote: ↑Sat Apr 15, 2023 7:21 pm

Well that topic aged poorly.

Bit early to say that yet, even Robert himself said that he's not sure if it's possible on the current DE-10 nano.

But either way, the foundational work here will mean that an N64 core will basically be ready to go as soon as we get a viable successor to the DE-10 nano, so it's still very exciting either way.

To be honest I think the bigger thing that may come of it is an actually viable and accurate software emulator which has never before existed.

rhester72 wrote: ↑Sun Apr 23, 2023 2:04 am

To be honest I think the bigger thing that may come of it is an actually viable and accurate software emulator which has never before existed.

Accurate? Yes, definitely ... Robert's emulator may be the most accurate N64 emulator ever created, the "bsnes of N64". But that is also applied to the performance (bsnes is brilliant but not exactly super performant) -- I don't believe Robert intends for it to be usable for anything other than testing. His latest (amazing!) screenshot of his emulator running Ocarina of Time also shows it was running at ~ 30% speed. I doubt he would be interested in refactoring it to run at a normal speed since that is not at all what it was developed for, but perhaps someone could come behind, fork the project, and optimize it for use outside of testing.

Also worth reiterating is that even if Robert hits a wall with N64 on DE-10 Nano, the community will have a tremendous incentive to find the next platform (playing N64 and possibly even DS with all the work Robert has also put in there!). Although off-the-shelf FPGA boards are out of the question due to the expense, perhaps someone in the community could do a for-profit crowdfunding of a workable FPGA platform ala Analogue...

mcf81 wrote: ↑Sun Apr 23, 2023 2:42 am

the community will have a tremendous incentive to find the next platform (playing N64 and possibly even DS with all the work Robert has also put in there!).

This 100%. MiST and later MiSTer gave a home to many cores that came before them. So having cores that don't fit on a. MiSTer will eventually make a bigger device interesting.

perhaps someone in the community could do a for-profit crowdfunding of a workable FPGA platform ala Analogue...

I wouldn't hold my breath on this one. Analogue (an established name) still was unable to make a device surpassing the MiSTer's FPGA for a good price. Why would a crowdfunding be any better?

Newsdee wrote: ↑Sun Apr 23, 2023 5:28 am

I wouldn't hold my breath on this one. Analogue (an established name) still was unable to make a device surpassing the MiSTer's FPGA for a good price. Why would a crowdfunding be any better?

I’m probably just dreaming big but with all the amazing things coming from the community these days it’s an easy thing to do!

The DE-10 Nano has been around since 2017, 6 years ago. Considering how fast things typically evolve in the field of computers, I find it kind of surprising that Terasic has yet to release a more powerful iteration, and that we're not even hearing about one being in the works. I'm not familiar with how FPGA processors are made, but can someone who does explain why things are this stagnant?

it's not about power, it's about the size of the chip itself, some can contain more gates than other, so there ARE bigger dev boards, but they are more expensive, you could spend 12k for some of them babies, we would totally port mister to them but who would buy them?

so the MiSTer project might move on to a better FPGA dev board, one day, if necessary, but right now since FPGAs aren't really a mainstream appliance, prices don't go down, in fact, even the de10's price goes up over time, and would be a lot more expensive if Intel wasn't subsidizing it for education

The DE-10 Nano was and is mostly directed at the beginners to start doing FPGA stuff, aka draw them in so they buy more FPGA´s for their projects and then to their job projects.
That is one reason that so many things is built into it like network connector/hdmi and so on.
At the same time that is one reason why there has not been any larger/faster FPGA´s put on it/or a new similar board has been made.
The DE-10 is simply big and fast enough for beginners and even for many really advanced things!

It's worth noting that the N64's MIPS R4300i CPU contained about 1.7 million transistors, over 10x the logic elements in DE-10 Nano's FPGA (110,000), and the RSP transistor count is 2.6 million. There are undoubtedly some optimizations that can and have been made but it may never be possible to fully emulate the N64 at full speed on this hardware.

Antoine.WG wrote: ↑Wed Apr 26, 2023 12:56 am

It's worth noting that the N64's MIPS R4300i CPU contained about 1.7 million transistors, over 10x the logic elements in DE-10 Nano's FPGA (110,000), and the RSP transistor count is 2.6 million. There are undoubtedly some optimizations that can and have been made but it may never be possible to fully emulate the N64 at full speed on this hardware.

Good thing a logic element is significantly more capable than a transistor

imo Xilinx offerings are crushing Altera. The Kria KR260 is a bit expensive at $350, but its XCZU5EV has more than twice the LEs than the Cyclone V. The DE10 Nano wins for having an insane number of user GPIO exposed. I don't know of any other boards that break out 80 pins. There are cheaper Kria options with even less broken out I/O, but I can't imagine anyone would be happy with even less than half the DE10 Nano's GPIO.

Also, it's essential that retooling isn't required to port cores, otherwise stuff will fall through the cracks. Altera is likely the safe choice.