Discussion and Development of a 'MiSTer 2.0' Modular Hardware Platform

[Reed_Solomon]

Well sipeed is apparently targeting a mister replacement with the gowin arora v 138k + Andes risc v cores

Their dev tooling is kind of meh, and Altera LEs aren't directly comparable to gowin LES, but it does look quite interesting for half the price and 138k le.

Would need a carrier with HDMI TX (12.5gbps serdes so 4k120 works lol) and low latency ram unless there's a direct to logic bus vs axi

But that's relatively easy to do: maybe HYPERRAM/rldram and ti tdp1204 on a USB c pd carrier with breakouts for controller gpio.

Promising and much cheaper than kria. Supposed to release in August.

Sipeed-Tang-Mega-138K-Pro-system-on-module.jpg (157.56 KiB) Viewed 3115 times

https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/10/01 ... isc-v-soc/

Looks pretty interesting. Supposed to be released next month. With the 3 BTB connectors you could potentially design a board where you just plug in the FPGA + Risc V SoC either directly or via some ribbon cables and perhaps even design a portable device. $120 for the system on module is pretty cheap.

Sipeed-Tang-Mega-138K-Pro-Dock.jpg (240.52 KiB) Viewed 3115 times

here it is in its own PCIe dock which is overkill and adds $195 to the price.

[dcubed]

I just noticed that the Efinix Ti 180 FPGA is finally available on Digikey for $55 in small quantities (80 units).

I think there's a place for a System-on-Module (SoM) ecosystem like the Raspberry Pi 4 CM. It may be possible to match the capability of the DE-10 with a cheaper board that's also portable. I think there's a lot of interest in a cheaper and/or portable system, especially one that's open-source. It doesn't have to be about making something more powerful. As others have pointed out, that's a dead-end road for many reasons.

I imagine a hand-held with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, a SoM socket, and a dock connector. If you're just after light emulation, no expensive SoM is needed, but if you want the full MiSTer experience, you plug in a module with an FPGA with its own SRAM. If you want to play a multi-player game or use an arcade box, plug it into a dock.

I know a lot of this isn't the most original plan in the world, but it seems like it might be worth the effort.

Edit: I know Efinix offers a cheaper Trion (non-Ti) family of FPGAs that goes up to 120K LEs for as little as $27 on Digikey, however; I have my doubts whether a design that takes up around 80% of a 110K LE Cyclone V could fit in a 120K LE Trion because the feature set and device design are so different.

The feature overlap between the Cyclone V and the Trion Titanium families is much greater, so it might be possible to make due with the 120K LE version of the Trion Titanium, but that chip is only marginally cheaper ($49 vs $55) than the 180K LE version, so I figure better safe than sorry.

That's the FPGA that MARS is using isn't it?

Guess we'll see what potential it has pretty soon then.

[Armakuni]

I just noticed that the Efinix Ti 180 FPGA is finally available on Digikey for $55 in small quantities (80 units).

I think there's a place for a System-on-Module (SoM) ecosystem like the Raspberry Pi 4 CM. It may be possible to match the capability of the DE-10 with a cheaper board that's also portable. I think there's a lot of interest in a cheaper and/or portable system, especially one that's open-source. It doesn't have to be about making something more powerful. As others have pointed out, that's a dead-end road for many reasons.

I imagine a hand-held with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, a SoM socket, and a dock connector. If you're just after light emulation, no expensive SoM is needed, but if you want the full MiSTer experience, you plug in a module with an FPGA with its own SRAM. If you want to play a multi-player game or use an arcade box, plug it into a dock.

I know a lot of this isn't the most original plan in the world, but it seems like it might be worth the effort.

Edit: I know Efinix offers a cheaper Trion (non-Ti) family of FPGAs that goes up to 120K LEs for as little as $27 on Digikey, however; I have my doubts whether a design that takes up around 80% of a 110K LE Cyclone V could fit in a 120K LE Trion because the feature set and device design are so different.

The feature overlap between the Cyclone V and the Trion Titanium families is much greater, so it might be possible to make due with the 120K LE version of the Trion Titanium, but that chip is only marginally cheaper ($49 vs $55) than the 180K LE version, so I figure better safe than sorry.

That's the FPGA that MARS is using isn't it?

Guess we'll see what potential it has pretty soon then.

I wouldn't get too carried away just yet. It still doesnt have enough resources to handle Nintendo DS which was confirmed by Robert.

[cb88]

I wouldn't get too carried away just yet. It still doesn't have enough resources to handle Nintendo DS which was confirmed by Robert.

It's worth pointing out also that after a certain point the need for cycle accurate emulation diminishes because everyone stopped coding close to the hardware... dreamcast and up probably don't need cycle accurate CPUs or GPUs at all.

There are a few systems that are well documented that could be ran on a much much faster and larger FPGA though, eg the sparc core would shine with a FPGA 2-3 times as large or more if you also want to implement say the SX (simple fast good) or Leo (very complicated) or AG10E (which is an amalgamation of like 5 different GPUs on a sandwiched board) GPUs (it really needs more execution width also in addition to faster and more logic)

Probably nobody would complain about faster 68k and amiga cores either (something along the lines of the vampire accelerators)

Pretty much the only option at this point is Xilinx Ultrascale+ or some newcomer because Intel has priced Agilex out of the market (perhaps they ahve agilex 3 slated but its a no show so far and non of the other agilex fpgas are even stocked anyway because they are too expensive).

Mistex on a Kintex (300k+ luts and faster logic) + Orange Pi Zero 2W looks very interesting honestly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXLaA0ITzy8

[Armakuni]

I wouldn't get too carried away just yet. It still doesn't have enough resources to handle Nintendo DS which was confirmed by Robert.

It's worth pointing out also that after a certain point the need for cycle accurate emulation diminishes because everyone stopped coding close to the hardware... dreamcast and up probably don't need cycle accurate CPUs or GPUs at all.

Mistex on a Kintex (300k+ luts and faster logic) + Orange Pi Zero 2W looks very interesting honestly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXLaA0ITzy8

Once systems started relying on GPUs they could not be designed cycle accurate due to frame to frame times, so software is really a better choice and we already a lot of mature emus for those systems.

Sorg posted a comment on the FB group years ago about why FPGA for retro gaming basically stops around Y2K and its due to multiple factors including how fast CPUs progressed in frequency and complexity. Some of new FPGAs seem very impressive but are also very expensive especially from AMD and Intel

The Amiga core CPU is held back by the TG68K open source CPU module rather than the DE10

MiSTex is a weird project as it converts the framework but the cores still need porting to the target FPGA and with support for multiple FPGAs will need multiple ports so might turn into a mess