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.
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
Wow, the times!
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.
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://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/ if you feel better about that).
Looks like Intel (prev Terasic) is still selling them but they're now around $300, they used to be under $150 if memory serves.
If I were jumping into this today, I'd prefer the much more powerful KV260[1] from the blog post over the DE10-Nano, that board was limited!
[0]https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/topic-tech...
[1]https://www.amd.com/en/products/system-on-modules/kria/k26/k...
Sidenote: somewhat sad to see the consolidation into Intel and AMD, but FPGAs have always been second class citizens in the silicon space :(
True in more ways than one!
- Agilex 5 E-Series 043 (Replay2 phat) has 434,240 logic elements (LEs).
- Agilex 5 E-Series 013 (Replay2 lite) has 138,060 Logic Elements (LEs).
The website (https://www.fpgaarcade.com/news-2/) hasn't been updated in some time but the dev now has prototype boards that he's in the middle of bringing up. It is purpose built for arcade emulation and has tons of I/O, lots of memory (both SRAM and HyperRAM), and (on the phat) a PCI connector. One or both (can't remember which) accepts an ARM daughterboard for hybrid emulation. There's a Discord for it you can track down to follow its progress basically in real time as mikej progresses.
PCs have been "unpredictable" like that almost since the beginning due to hardware variation, so emulating timings isn't much of a problem for emulators, as is the case in the featured article.
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.
Reciprocally though 10 even 15 year old GPUs (half as old) are actually often pretty good and useful, for a lot of people. And they're what some people have. Many have multiple 100's of GB/s of memory bandwidth, which is pretty potent even today! That they can be so much better and that they do keep getting better is pretty amazing.
The biggest downside imo is power efficiency. A lot of these cards are on older hotter processes. They lack modern instructions and have to brute force various features. Some signficiant downclocking, undervolting can help a lot for this!
Consumer GPUs have really slowed in progress a lot, especially since 3xxx. With the pressure to upgrade diminishing significantly, I feel like there's an increasing need to have good long term support and care. I don't see anyone but open source as willing able or interested in putting in long term care for products in general. And the broader hope of open source: those willing able and eager to keep making sure the street can find its own use for things. That we can go as far as we might dream.
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.
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.
That's the spec of my retro PC. I never had one of those back in the day, but it scratches the itch.
Ended up giving it away to an irc friend for the cost of shipping, they used it to start a minecraft server hosting business.
20 years later I now have nieces and nephews wondering how I know so much about minecraft, can't wait until they're a little older so I can host one for them. Funny how much and how little things change
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 is on the front page as I write this.)
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.