Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by qrios 83 days ago
It’s been a while since I’ve struggled with Xilinx tools, but I can’t imagine there aren’t any hardware limitations these days. Does this run on a Spartan 6, or do you need the latest UltraScale for it?

Or does this only run in simulation anyway?
2 comments
fayalalebrun 82 days ago
This fits and runs in a DE-10 Nano without too much difficulty, uses around 70% of the fabric. I've been working on timing closure and just got it to 50 MHz.

Note that I also implemented cache components not present in the original Voodoo in order to be more flexible in terms of the memory that can be used. So it could be quite a bit smaller, maybe 50% of the fabric if you got rid of that.

link
pezezin 82 days ago
That's quite impressive. 70% is obviously way too big for a MiSTer core, but I wonder if one day we will have an affordable FPGA board able to simulate a late '90s PC...
link
Joel_Mckay 82 days ago
FPGA simulations are a naive attempt to guess at Metastability problems by finding a "steady state" latency after a certain amount of simulation time. Clock domain crossing mitigation only gets folks so far, and state propagation issues often get worse with larger and faster chips.

Note, there are oversized hobby Voodoo cards that max out the original ASIC count and memory limits. There are also emulators like 86box that simulate the hardware just fine for old games.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4295RCp0GQ

>Or does this only run in simulation anyway?

If they are a LLM user, than it is 100% an April fools joke. =3

link