Comment by OCTAGRAM
11 hours ago
> The whole system runs on a low-cost development board (Xilinx Spartan-3 by Digilent, with 1 MB of static RAM)
If somebody wants their FPGA work to be available, they better choose MiSTer FPGA from the beginning. Costlier, but way more likely to be found around.
The availability of the board to run Wirt's system was an issue pretty soon. There were even people who offered their own boards to fill the gap (e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20160831063355/http://oberonstat...).
My system version instead runs on RISC-V, so no custom FPGA implementation, currently on an emulator, but eventually on the ESP32 (which has a much better availability).
> they better choose MiSTer FPGA from the beginning.
Well, the MiSTer project was yet 4 years from being launched back in 2013 when the RISC-5 was implemented in FPGA, so I hope you'd excuse Wirth from not choosing it.
And shortly after Wirth launched his RISC-5 system, the original FPGA board went out of production.
Which most likely wasn't predictable for him.
FPGAs were never that maker friendly, due to the whole ecosystem.
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