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EEVblog => News/Suggestions/Help => Topic started by: paulcav on September 18, 2017, 12:28:52 am

Title: FPGA - reviving retro computin and gaming
Post by: paulcav on September 18, 2017, 12:28:52 am

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Apple_II_tranparent_800.png)

It has been many many moons (a very long time) since the
Apple 2 computer  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_series) was launched as well as the  Atari ST (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_ST),  Amiga 500 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_500), Commodore 64 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64), Vic 20 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_VIC-20) just to name a few. Now that they are no longer manufacturing these personal computers what can you do? There is finding them for sale on eBay, classifieds but only second hand and sometimes they are not working or incomplete.  A typical scenario is that you have come across a game that you once played on a computer back in the 80's or 90's and it brings a tear to your eye. So what to do?  A possible solution is to use a FPGA to create the logic circuitry of a 6502 or whatever CPU you want and bring back that old Apple or Atari or Amiga computer so you can explore what is was like in days gone by or perhaps replay that old favourita pub game Galaga.

What i would like to see is Dave examine the old computers and show how modern technology such as FPGA can be used to recreate these computers and demonstrate how flexible these FPGA devices can be in that they can be reprogrammed to be used for more than one computer hardware design.

(http://fpgaarcade.com/wp4/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/page-replay.jpg)

There are a number of these devices that i have come across such as FPGA Arcade or replay (http://www.fpgaarcade.com/),  MIST FPGA (http://harbaum.org/till/mist/index.shtml) i'm sure you get the idea.

Title: Re: FPGA - reviving retro computin and gaming
Post by: brucehoult on September 18, 2017, 06:06:46 am
FPGAs are a bit of overkill for this purpose. PC CPUs have been capable of software (serial) emulation of that generation of hardware for twenty years already.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAME

These days, an ARM machine such as a Raspberry Pi is fast enough to do this kind of emulation.

You can get FPGA chips that would do the job cheaper than a Raspberry Pi, but I don't know of any *boards* containing them, and the necessary peripheral drivers and connectors, that are cheaper.

Of course it can be a fun exercise anyway.