The Ulx3s board is open source hardware with all its design files available on github. The FPGA development boards are proprietary, as is the synthesis software.
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The Mister project is under active development and currently has recreations of more than 40 old computers, nearly 20 games consoles, 80 or more arcade machines and a few other machines.īut the only part of these projects that is open source is the HDL. The Mist and Mister projects have recreated the most old computers. There are nightly builds of all these tools at the Open Tool Forge project.įor The Ulx3s board, the main tool for uploading bitstreams is fujprog. For the ECP5 board, this is Project Trellis.
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The main synthesis tools for Verilog are iVerilog and Verilator.Įach chip supported by the open source tool chain has its own reverse engineering project that includes chip-specific tools. The main open source tools for FPGAs are Yosys for synthesis, nextpnr for place-and-route and GHDL and its Yosys plugin to support VHDL.
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Until fairly recently, all software that converted HDL to the bistream for an FPGA was proprietary commercial software owned, licensed and sold by the FPGA chip vendor.īut starting from 2015, open source tool chains have been available to synthesize the HDL and produce FPGA bitstreams. The only thing that cannot currently be open source is the FPGA chip itself. The board itself can be open source hardware, and the tools that convert the HDL to a bitstream can be open source software. Open Source FPGAsįPGA boards can be open source in a number of ways. By wiring together a large number of LUTs, the original logic can be recreated. LUTs contain a number of flip-flops and a configurable logic function that maps a number of inputs to a number of outputs. The same HDL can also be used to create hard-wired chips such as ASICs.Īt the lowest level FPGAs do not match the exact transistors and logic gates of the original machine, but instead use look-up tables (LUTs) as their logic elements. Nowadays however, there are also synthesis tools that convert the logic into bitstream files that can be uploaded to an FPGA and effectively turn the FPGA into a machine that executes the digital logic described by the HDL. Hardware Description Languages were originally designed to simulate digital logic and they can still be used for that purpose using open source tools such as iVerilog and Verilator. However, you do not have to write directly in these languages, as you can use more powerful languages that generate HDL, such as migen, nmigen, SpinalHDL, Chisel and Silice.
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The two main hardware description languages are Verilog (and its more powerful SystemVerilog variant), and VHDL.
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To recreate the digital logic of a machine using an FPGA, you need to code the logic in a Hardware Description Language (HDL). With hardware emulation buffering of the video signal beyond what was done in the original machine needs to be avoided, and to achieve this CRT monitors need to be used as LCD monitors always have some lag. It is hard to avoid lag with software emulation. how many video frames are displayed before the effect of user input is seen. Lag is usually measured in video frames, i.e. However, this level of accuracy is seldom needed unless the intention is to preserve the digital logic of the original chip.Īvoiding lag between input and output devices can be important when playing fast-moving games, for them to have the same "feel" as the original. The same can be true of other for other chips, not just the CPU. It is possible for CPU implementations to be more than just cycle accurate: they can be accurate right down to the logic level, implementing the same flip-flops and exactly the same combinatorial logic. See the book also called Racing the Beam. That is because the Atari 2600 used a technique known as "Racing the Beam" to produce video output using a minimal amount of RAM and no video frame buffer, or equivalent. This is important to accurately run software from some machines, such as the Atari 2600 games console, where the timing of the code had to closely match the timing of the video signal. Cycle-accurate CPU implementations execute all instructions in exactly the same number of machine cycles as the original CPU. Not all FPGA recreations are this faithful to the original and do not need to be to run the software from these early machines. It can also be used to preserve, for posterity, the hardware logic of those original machines. This enables it to achieve much more accurate timing and minimal lag. Software emulationĮmulation of old computers, game consoles and arcade machines on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), if done well, can be much more accurate than software emulation, as it can recreate the digital logic of the original computer. Retro computing on the Ulx3s ECP5 FPGA board Hardware vs.