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by cmrdporcupine 924 days ago
I started an FPGA hobby project a few years ago (Before Covid[tm]) that tied a PicoRV32 core to my custom hand-made 80s-style "video chip" VDP type + direct access to SRAM with the hopes of making something like a "Retro-V"; boot straight to a BASIC (or Lua or something) prompt, etc. I had it supporting text generation, and most of the stuff to do simple tiles/sprites, and booting into a little custom "kernel."

I stalled once I started trying to integrate with the SD Card on my dev board. It got un-fun and then I got distracted by the apocalypse.

But I still think it's a neat idea, to tie RISC-V to that kind of "instant on" hobbyist architecture.

EDIT: looks like this "IceStation" project ended up doing mostly what I was intending, and started not long after me, but actually shipped something. Mine was targeting a Xilinx Artix-7 board, tho.