Comment by Yhippa
8 years ago
I know this has been said before but this is one of the coolest things I've seen posted here on HN. My undergrad is in computer engineering and this post brought back a flood of writing VHDL and doing design in Mentor Graphics.
I'm going to read this a few more times. It's like reading a good book about my hopes and dreams.
Thanks :) (I don't mind people saying it over and over again, believe me :P)
I actually started building a much smaller video game console with a cheap Cyclone II FPGA board (a friend of mine wanted one and I tried to figure it out how I could make something smaller and cheaper but still retro and cool) and I'm using VHDL, it's not exactly easy to learn but it's pretty cool, and I find it really hard to find good resources to learn from.
If I was to start all over again, I would use an FPGA for the graphics, for sure, at the time I just didn't know how.
And thanks again for the comment :)
You could use a Zynq FPGA that has a built-in dual core ARM processor. It has 512K of L2 cache and 256K of memory, more than enough to basically copy the same architecture into that design. It also has ADCs built in so you can implement analog joysticks too. It's also probably fast enough to build a graphics processor in logic. Only thing you may want to keep is the sound processor because there is no built-in DAC so you would need to implement that anyway.
Port it to MiSTer?