What is the killer app for FPGAs? For some people today, the allure is the extremely-superior knowledge throughput for parallelizable tasks, which can help some fairly gnarly tasks. But what if you are just setting up out? How about 1980s style movie game titles?
The MiSTer FPGA task created a bit of FPGA components that would make it uncomplicated to make effectively any previous university video clip game or personal computer system. That’s a huge clean slate. Of training course, you can simply just obtain an individual else’s Atari ST or Commodore 64 set up and load it up, but if you want to master FPGAs when recreating outdated-university video clip sport equipment, you’re likely to want to get your hands soiled.
[Mister Retro Wolf] began up a video series last wintertime (trailer embedded beneath) exactly where he’s embarked on a undertaking to recreate a vintage movie activity equipment from the floor up employing the MiSTer FPGA system. In certain, he’s likely to recreate the Namco Tank Battalion arcade game, from the schematics, in Verilog.
This is basically making a 6502-based mostly movie recreation machine from scratch (in gateware), so if you’re interested in retrocomputing or FPGAs, you are going to have anything to discover below. He’s gotten through the CPU, monitor, tilemap graphics, and memory so considerably, but it’s not performed still. To observe together, get by yourself some hardware and you can almost certainly catch up.
We have covered the MiSTer FPGA project just before, of training course, simply because we assume it’s awesome. And if a online video activity arcade equipment is going to be your gateway drug into the seedy earth of programmable gates, then so be it.
