MiSTer FPGA Forum

Let me start this post by I know nothing about programming or programming in HDL. I was just curious more advanced PC core would be possible usinkg both the Arm Cortex A9 and Cyclone V combined in a hybrid mode. Seeing the Arm Cortex A9 weak by today's standards should comparable in performance to a late Pentium 2 or early Pentium 3.

Would it be possible to dedicate a single Arm Cortex A9 from the DE10 Nano to run CPU code in DOS and Windows 95/98? If possible would it then be possible to use the Cyclone V for emulating something like the 3DFX Voodoo 1 or higher and a Soundblaster 16?

I'm only asking because if possible then Mister could give a new impulse to retro PC gaming.

Disclaimer: I say this as a pc hardware guy from way back but not an FPGA guy.


I’m not sure how well the arm side of the mister would emulate a pc processor. It’s a pretty weak version of arm on the de10, it shares the onboard ddr3 (so both the FPGA and arm will compete for memory access, slowing each other down?).

The arm side is probably more useful for expansion card emulation like say a 3D accelerator for dos, or sound board emulator like mt32pi or such.

If I’m not mistaken the arm side already has a 3D capable onboard GPU on it which could emulate glide or other old 3d cars via a driver (eg glade)? Possibly easier than reimplementing a voodoo in FPGA?

Ie the arm side would be doing something much closer to native than trying to emulate a very different cpu architecture.

throAU wrote: ↑Wed Mar 03, 2021 1:31 pm If I’m not mistaken the arm side already has a 3D capable onboard GPU on it which could emulate glide or other old 3d cars via a driver (eg glade)? Possibly easier than reimplementing a voodoo in FPGA?

It doesn't I'm afraid, just a dual core ARM processor and as you said a pretty weak one at that.

H6rdc0re wrote: ↑Sun Feb 07, 2021 12:01 am Let me start this post by I know nothing about programming or programming in HDL. I was just curious more advanced PC core would be possible usinkg both the Arm Cortex A9 and Cyclone V combined in a hybrid mode. Seeing the Arm Cortex A9 weak by today's standards should comparable in performance to a late Pentium 2 or early Pentium 3.

Would it be possible to dedicate a single Arm Cortex A9 from the DE10 Nano to run CPU code in DOS and Windows 95/98? If possible would it then be possible to use the Cyclone V for emulating something like the 3DFX Voodoo 1 or higher and a Soundblaster 16?

I'm only asking because if possible then Mister could give a new impulse to retro PC gaming.

Having ran Htop over SSH whilst running ao486 core, running doom with fuildsynth for music ARM cpu usage stands at roughly 100% on one core and 30-40% on the second, seems like there is little room available already without removing features. Dosbox on an overclocked Pi3b for example can have significant slow downs and to be frank it wipes the floor with the De10 on ARM side and it has a GPU.

Not sure if fluidsynth is really optimized for this core.

But, what about mapping FPU operations?

jordi wrote: ↑Thu Mar 11, 2021 5:04 pm Not sure if fluidsynth is really optimized for this core.

But, what about mapping FPU operations?

I wish, hopefully someone will make a miracle happens!