MiSTer FPGA Forum

Simple question, like the PC/Console world, what's the next upgrade for FPGA? What's the upgrade path to the DE10?

Would it help to have a bigger/faster FPGA? In order to have other console like Playstation, Saturn or Dreamcast or 32bits PC?

No I'm not looking for a Raspberry Pi, I much prefer "the real thing" -vs- emulation.

I imagine an upgrade will come when the current FPGA is no longer viable for new cores and larger/faster ones have come down in price or been subsidized down to a reasonable price like the DE10 nano has been. It'll probably be several years at the least, if I had to guess.

I don't know if the Dreamcast is possible (my guess is probably not), but people are working on Playstation, Saturn, and N64 cores, with the Playstation core making excellent progress.

PlayStation is already being worked on. It will probably fit and be able to run, but no guarantees yet. Check out laxer3a and support his development to help likely make it happen.

https://www.patreon.com/laxer3a

N64 will probably be impossible on the MiSTer because cpu speed is 3x the speed of the PSX, the RDRAM would probably be a problem to simulate, and the GPU is monstrously powerful by comparison. The Saturn, maybe.

An upgrade in terms of size would be possible on the cyclone V platform, but to what benefit? Mainly just features and maybe a few other systems that couldn't fit because of complexity (but not speed). Cyclone V SoCs though get very costly when you get bigger than the DE10-Nano.

Ao486 is struggling to fit on the DE10-Nano as is. 32-bit PC would be tough I imagine. The speed would also be a huge problem for any FPGA atm, let alone ones any of us could afford.

Ummm...ao486 _is_ emulating a 32-bit processor. Not sure what "32-bit PC" means.

It will depend where the bottlenecks are. The older MiST was constrained by a smaller FPGA that struggled to fit newer cores, but the DE10 has much more capacity.

The parts that could be an issue in the future are memory bandwidth and CPU/GPU speed, which may require a more expensive FPGA (or external chips) to work. That said, there is no core yet that requires either.

Devs are a creative bunch too. Neogeo was thought to need double RAM banks, but thanks to some Sorgelig magic, that ended up not being needed. On MiST the SNES core did not fit originally, but it ended up being ported by Gyurco dropping a few features (e.g. Super FX support).

Do you have a specific concern about upgradability?

rhester72 wrote: ↑Wed Aug 05, 2020 1:31 pm Not sure what "32-bit PC" means.

32-Bit is just the word size for the instructions the CPU has to run.
It is how much information the CPU can do in one instruction and how much maximum ram that CPU can address.
for 32-bit CPUs the theoretical maximum amount of ram is 4 GB (in reality windows can't go pass 3.5 GB, in a 4GB of ram the OS would not see the last 0.5 GB)
64-bit CPUs theoretical maximum is 17,179,869,184 GB (16 exabytes) of memory.

So for example the N64 can never take advantage of their CPU being 64-bit, and most of their instructions ran in 32-bit mode.

It does not really means that much, console marketing over emphasized bit-sized to consumers who had no idea what the numbers really mean.
Hence why you got people thinking the Dreamcast and PS2 running at 128-Bit, despite such a CPU never existed.

The word size as nothing to do with actual computing power when it comes to the systems the MiSTer emulates.

@darksakul I know what bus and instruction widths are, I'm not sure that's what @aberu meant (because again, the existing emulated processor is 32-bit already).

rhester72 wrote: ↑Mon Mar 29, 2021 3:26 am @darksakul I know what bus and instruction widths are, I'm not sure that's what @aberu meant (because again, the existing emulated processor is 32-bit already).

I don't even remember what I meant. This got necro'd so figured I'd take a look... Sometimes I swap in words randomly, various mental illnesses combined cause issues. I imagine I meant to type "Dreamcast" there, but OP used "32bits-pc" and I mixed it up. When I reread their comment the N64 (from jdeberhart's comment) and Dreamcast really stand out to me as the tough (impossible for the Dreamcast) ones.

That being said, the overwhelming majority of things that are playable on ao486 are 16-bit games. Games that took advantage of the 32-bit capabilities of the 486 platform were pretty rare, that came into play more during the Pentium era. This is primarily why you have to use DOSBox on a modern 64-bit Windows installation to run these old DOS games, because those old 16-bit instructions are not compatible at all with modern processors and operating systems. Additionally 32-bit versions of windows 10 have a built-in 16-bit compatibility mode you can add as a feature, and run those old DOS games (with dubious compatibility). But still, I think I just mixed stuff up in my mind when I was reading it.

If anyone gets Fury³ to work, lemme know

I don't have the game, but Fury 3 should in theory be runnable. I'll give it a shot if you have the installer.