FPGA N64

http://www.ultrafp64.com/

by AndrewDucker • 3 years ago

407 82 3 years ago

nemo1618• 3 years ago

Looks like the most recent youtube video was 3 years ago, and the most recent twitch stream was 2 years ago. Anyone know the actual current status of this?

speps• 3 years ago

Maybe he was hired for this: https://www.analogue.co/3d

The timeline matches, 2 years between hire and announcement.

Discussed a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37901025

grobibi• 3 years ago

garciansmith• 3 years ago

Really impressing the progress he's made with that MiSTer core, especially since for years people said there was absolutely no way an N64 core could work on the MiSTer's DE10 nano FPGA board.

christoph2• 3 years ago

Ah, so this is the same as the Mister core? I thought it was a different codebase from the Mister core as I couldn’t see any mention of Mister, DE-10 or Nano on the page, so blindly assumed it was developed for a much larger FPGA (making my earlier comment below redundant).

naikrovek• 3 years ago

it's much more about the community knowing for sure that something was impossible while also not knowing what they were talking about. each person said it was impossible because they read someone else say it was impossible, which itself started way back early in the project when someone said that any 3D console would be impossible.

this was obviously always possible, but it required someone who wasn't indoctrinated into the community. the community behind a project is always both the very best and very worst thing about any project.

blitz_skull• 3 years ago

What is this? Besides apparently a hardware compatability... thingy.. for N64?

a_t48• 3 years ago

Hardware emulation for an N64 with HDMI out

asveikau• 3 years ago

I haven't been following the scene too closely, but there's been a huge ecosystem of fpga clones of 90s video game consoles in the last few years. The "mister" project is one such endeavor.

The market for the original hardware, old cartridges and mods for things like better video signals or Bluetooth controllers is also popping.

assimpleaspossi• 3 years ago

That's the million dollar question for so many hardware and software projects where the information is linked to some page that says nothing about what it is or what it does including the github link to its creator here.

pjmlp• 3 years ago

It looks incredible, great amount of work invested into it.

christoph2• 3 years ago

Looks like great work! I feel it’s worth mentioning that there is also an N64 core for MisterFPGA now - https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?t=6947

exabrial• 3 years ago

Cache memory with duel clocks

:) Just a nitpick, don't mind me. This is a neat project

Dual = There are two clocks

Dueling = The clocks are swinging swords at each other

fb032• 3 years ago

each clock has 2 swords wielded in their 'hands' ?

reactordev• 3 years ago

Perpetually slashing each other in turn. To keep that cache fresh? To “cut down” on cache size? To conquer cache daemons?

djbusby• 3 years ago

Shaving time off my development estimates hoping for sunshine.

jonhohle• 3 years ago

A dual wielding duel?

isoprophlex• 3 years ago

Related: Analogue have a N64 FPGA clone "coming in 2024" https://www.analogue.co/3d

Not much info on the page, also I'm not in any way affiliated. Just think it's cool that this is getting commercialized.

badlucklottery• 3 years ago

RobertPeip (FPGAzumSpass, the developer of the Mister PS1 core) also an open source N64 FPGA core in development: https://github.com/RobertPeip/Mister64

bluescrn• 3 years ago

Analogue make cool stuff, it's just a shame that their business model seems so strangely focused on enriching scalpers (extremely limited supply and numerous 'limited edition' releases even when the standard model is unobtanium - and most of them end up straight on eBay for silly prices)

philistine2• 3 years ago

Either they're their own resellers and don't want to change, or they can't get enough FPGA cores so they turn to silliness to market their very limited inventory.

rlabrecque• 3 years ago

Similarly they offer very little support, almost no communication, and yeah, just kind of weird.

ericlewis• 3 years ago

They’re a really small company and lean heavily on their sibling company 8bitdo for some bits. Getting the FPGAs is the problem generally, and the same reason why it’s hard to find a mister. They usually similar chips too.

The size of the company also explains the support issues.

pcchristie• 3 years ago

I've bought everything they've made, but they don't have great customer support.

The only shipping they do is extremely expensive express shipping internationally. They had some adapters that were previously OOS come available, but the Pocket system was OOS. I emailed them, asking them if I could buy the adapters, have them put them aside, and reserve the Pocket, and have them ship it all at once whenever the Pocket was in stock. I even offered to pay it all up front so they weren't put out. They basically (politely) told me to suck it up, and buy both, and pay ~ 100 AUD each time to ship them express, separately.

placesalt• 3 years ago

Related, any recommendations on low-cost ways to start playing around with FPGAs? Boards, chips, projects?

derefnull• 3 years ago

educational developer kits https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...

there are a few different major brands

ooterness• 3 years ago

Diligent makes several boards for the educational market, prices in the sub-$200 range. (And the devices are small enough they can be used with the no-cost version of the AMD/Xilinx toolchain.)

https://digilent.com/shop/fpga-boards/development-boards/int...

For online courses, I've heard good things about Nand2Tetris but have not tried it myself.

https://www.nand2tetris.org/

arein2• 3 years ago

I looked at nand2tetris a while ago briefly and I have the impression that it focuses too much on making complex circuits.

The target audience for nand2tetris are people that want to understand how the CPU works, and nand2tetris focuses too much on how to make logic using nand gates leaving other areas uncovered.

I recommend the Ben Eater youtube chamnel, he has a series of videos about building an 8bit computer, that in my opinion is much more informative for a curious person.

MaKey• 3 years ago

You might be interested in this new book: https://nostarch.com/gettingstartedwithfpgas

progbits• 3 years ago

I like the iCEBreaker board, relatively cheap (80 euro), uses the digilent Pmod interface for add-on boards and the Lattice FPGA works well with OSS tooling (Yosys, Icestorm, ... for me this is a deal-breaker as I hate the proprietary IDEs).

Here are some project tutorials for it (should be easy to adapt to other hardware too):

https://github.com/icebreaker-fpga/icebreaker-workshop https://github.com/icebreaker-fpga/WTFpga

Calloutman• 3 years ago

Altera MAX 10 evaluation board is probably one of the cheapest options. You use quartus prime lite to configure it which is free, and better than the equivalent Lattice tools.

dyselon• 3 years ago

There's a ton of of dev boards out there, but I would say to be sure to get something with hardware buttons and LEDs, as it really helps with some of the Hello World level of things, and many of the cheapest options won't have those.

I started messing with FPGAs with the DE0-Nano, but eventually got so frustrated with the tiny buttons that I upgraded to a DE0-CV, which I really enjoyed my time with. It has some 7 segment LEDs, physical switches, and buttons, and it also has a VGA port, PS/2 port, and Micro SD card slot, so you can build a pretty snazzy little PC if you want to.

ge96• 3 years ago

orange crab another option

throttlebody• 3 years ago

https://www.papilio.cc/ has a lot useful information.

alephnerd• 3 years ago

Take that Sony!

(The PS2 is also implemented on a FPGA. Idk whether the PS1 is or isn't though)

monocasa• 3 years ago

The PS2 is not implemented on an FPGA. There might have been some internal dev hardware with some FPGAs, but nothing released.

semiquaver• 3 years ago

(Obligatory “is this website hosted on the N64?” joke)

rdlw4• 3 years ago

If anyone is interested in new projects for N64 hardware, Kaze Emanuar has an amazing series about optimizing Super Mario 64 to run incredibly complex romhacks on original hardware.

Interestingly, SM64 is usually throttled by memory speed. This means that using 'inline' is detrimental to performance, since making the program larger can cause another read from memory.

Here's an overview video, he has many more specific videos about specific topics:

https://youtu.be/t_rzYnXEQlE?si=6yNnsTxOr7M5v4ub

kibwen2• 3 years ago

new projects for N64 hardware

There's an entire community doing N64 homebrew: https://n64brew.dev/wiki/Main_Page , including a faction who are working on a Rust SDK (basic demo: https://youtu.be/XmlmvRrRFqs).

rdlw4• 3 years ago

I know a lot less about the homebrew community but it's also very cool! Do you know of a big project that would be an interesting entry point for getting into the community?

phoboslab• 3 years ago

Romhacks are typically modifying the compiled binary ROM image. Kaze' work is based on the painstakingly disassembled code from the n64decomp project[1]. He's working in C, modifying the game and compiling it again for the original hardware. Not sure I'd call that a "romhack".

Great videos though!

[1] https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64

rdlw4• 3 years ago

From a player's perspective, I do think they tend to be called romhacks if they are based on an existing game, although I agree that's selling the project short as it's based on the decompiled source with heavy changes made.

It's sort of been a smooth transition from literal ROM hacks, to hacks with custom assembly, to hacks that are compiled from source, but the name has stuck.

nubinetwork2• 3 years ago

Developers for Nintendo consoles have been using C the whole time, even moreso after the SNES. I can't imagine how long it would take to make a N64 game if I had to do it all in assembly.

psyclobe• 3 years ago

So rust should solve all their problems right?

westurner• 3 years ago

"Show HN: Ghidra Plays Mario" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37475761 :

[RL, ..., MuZero unplugged w/ PyTorch ]

Farama-Foundation/Gymnasium is a fork of OpenAI/gym and it has support for additional Environments like MuJoCo: https://github.com/Farama-Foundation/Gymnasium#environments

The Mario64 game can be won with a minimal number of stars;

Farama-Foundation/MO-Gymnasiun: "Multi-objective Gymnasium environments for reinforcement learning": https://github.com/Farama-Foundation/MO-Gymnasium

Ghidra may or may not be useful for e.g. gadgets with mario64

Return-oriented programming > On the x86-architecture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return-oriented_programming#On...

fb032• 3 years ago

Although you're semantically correct, I do want to point out that the final game/mod will probably be distributed as a patch against the original rom - that's quite romhack-y if you ask me ;-)

modeless• 3 years ago

I love what he did, but it seems like his recent stuff is only running his romhack. Did he ever make a build of the original Mario 64 with all his peformance fixes, so the original game content can run at 60 FPS on a real N64?

worewood• 3 years ago

No, and he made a video about it. Basically he worked on the optimizations together with his modifications. He should've done a separate branch on the codebase with only optimizations on the original code

trollied• 3 years ago

HN has hugged it too hard. archive mirror link: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.ultrafp64.com

make3• 3 years ago

mirror: https://archive.ph/7KXgz

thehias• 3 years ago

The project UltraFP64 will be released as Analogue 3D only.

sbarre• 3 years ago

Source?

ChuckMcM• 3 years ago

That is quite an achievement! It extends the range of fully realizable game consoles that are realizable in inexpensive FPGAs. At one time I saw a web article on FPGA versions of arcade game architectures (looking it up it seems that became the 'mistercade' project for JAMMA compliant cabinets). I'm always amazed at the creativity here, both in the original designer's part and in recreator's part of reproducing that same vision.

crtified3• 3 years ago

For the thousands of people in the MiSTer FPGA ecosystem, some of whom bought the hardware [0] as long ago as 2020, for well under $200 (it's more, now [1]), a featureful FPGA N64 core - developed by Robert Peip, who is paid, most would say very deservedly, thousands per month via P_treon) - will be coming soon as a free update, once the already very advanced work is complete. The betas are playable now, and there are near daily updates.

[0] https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/setup/requireme...

[1] https://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=...

nix0n• 3 years ago

Why did you censor "P_treon"? Or are "a" and "_" close on your keyboard?

crtified3• 3 years ago

No great reason, other than a vague unease at the tacit promotion (to people, and/or to future spiders/bots) involved in citing the name of a specific corporate - it being a largely irrelevant side element of the greater point I was here to make.

LeoPanthera• 3 years ago

I never got a MiSTer but I was always vaguely interested. Has the hardware been updated in all that time? Or is an updated one likely in the future?

deelowe• 3 years ago

They still use the de10 board as the base but there's been improvements to the io boards and memory support. Faster/higher density memory is what has allowed for the more modern systems to be supported.

There's a project called marsfpga that will support newer hardware.

crtified3• 3 years ago

The MiSTer, which imo is still by far the best bang-for-buck system of it's type either on the market now, or likely to hit the market anytime soon, is still based upon the original hardware. Several peripherals and form factors have been added or updated as options, but the central processors are the same.

Software updates are a different matter entirely. The system has evolved greatly, with each year so far having resulted in an impressive list of new additions and improvements.

The cogs and wheels of the niche entrepreneur industry have been slowly turning, and the next 1 - 5 years promises several likely newer generation products. People highly invested in some of the 32- and 64- bit systems not covered by MiSTer, and or people who want more modern display options, will be very interested in those. The price projections seem to be aiming at the $500-$1000 range.

But as of today it's still hard to look past the MiSTer, as a multi-year already proven system, which has for years offered elite level 8- and 16- bit recreations, recently added an amazing Playstation 1 core, is close to adding an N64 core, and can be had right now all-inclusive starting in the $300 segment.

lukeck• 3 years ago

There have been a few minor revisions of some of the optional add on boards and things like SNAC adaptors for using original controllers from different systems.

There have also been a few different takes on making a mister in more of a console form factor, and boards that integrate into arcade cabinets or fit in ITX PC cases.

The software has come a hell of a long way. In the army days, the most advanced cores were 8 bit systems like the NES. Now we’ve got PlayStation 1, Sega Saturn and N64 in the works. Similar progress has been made supporting old computer and arcade systems too.

There is an upcoming sort of successor called Marsfpga that’s recently started being teased. From the little that’s been shared so far, the community seems hopeful that this will mean the Dreamcast and support for arcade games through the early 2000s are possibilities.

Once you get much beyond that era, an FPGA-based approach makes less sense - the systems become much, much more complex and also largely standardise around with x86 or ARM where there are always to run them without emulation at all. A notable exception to that is the PS3 with its cell architecture. Then again, people said for a long time that PS1 and Saturn were not possible.

MegaDeKay• 3 years ago

It doesn't mention the FPGA platform used for this so I did a bit of digging. Looks like Digilent's "Nexys Video Artix-7 FPGA: Trainer Board for Multimedia Applications". This goes for $550 and of course doesn't count all of the PMOD's and other hardware hanging off the board.

https://digilent.com/shop/nexys-video-artix-7-fpga-trainer-b...

edude03• 3 years ago

To be fair it's not clear (and unlikely) that that's the lowest end fpga this could run on. It's more likely that's what they had available

amelius• 3 years ago

That's some plumbing even Mario and Luigi would be impressed by.

tombert2• 3 years ago

I wonder if we're going to hit a wall on cycle-accurate software emulation; Higan is pretty cool, but even that requires a fairly beefy CPU considering it's emulating something reasonably primitive like the SNES.

I know nothing about electronics, but the recent uptick in FPGA game systems like the MiSTer getting Playstation and N64 support, I am hoping that FPGAs can pick up where Higan left off; it would be great to get cycle-accurate emulation of the Xbox 360 some day since I never fixed mine after getting a red ring.

philistine2• 3 years ago

I do not believe it is possible to run an Xbox 360 game without copyrighted code from Microsoft. So we might see it from projects just like this one, but I wouldn't hold my breath for Analogue to ever release anything past the PS2.

tombert2• 3 years ago

Conceivably we could get some kind of Wine/ReactOS thing couldn't we? Something that recreates the APIs well enough to play most games?

That said, I acknowledge that that would take a lot more work, and it might not be economically worth it for Analogue or the MiSTer people to bother with it.

phire• 3 years ago

Cycle-accurate software emulation is a topic that I've been looking into on and off for years.

The Higan concurrency architecture hit a wall because it needs to sync between modules every single cycle, what gets very expensive as the clock rates go up.

But you don't need to sync every single cycle, especially once CPUs started getting caches, so we just need a new concurrency architecture that's flexible enough to only sync when needed.

I've been experimenting with an actor based concurrency model which seems to be fast enough for a cycle-accurate N64 emulator (though I won't know until I have the RSP and RDP implemented). I'm hoping it might even be fast enough for 6th gen consoles, perhaps when combined with other techniques like a cycle-accurate jit and fine-grained memory locks.

I'll have to post an article if it ever gets to a workable state.

------

As for cycle-accurate FPGA emulators, I don't think they are cost-effective even for something like the N64, yet alone a 360. You can get 90% of the way there with a cycle accurate CPU, shared bus, cycle accurate RSP/RDP. But you have to map the RDRAM onto DDR3 memory and the timings don't really line up. The linked UltraFP64 project doesn't even try for accurate RAM timings and will preform better than a real N64. I suspect the WIP n64 core for MiSTer is much the same.

You could build a custom board with memory that actually matches the timings, but that gets expensive.

snvzz• 3 years ago

I see a donation button, but not a link to the source code.

Not sure this thing is open source hardware, or available to anyone in any form, or even real.

knigge111• 3 years ago

Wow, just wow! For me, these guys are god's!

phendrenad2• 3 years ago

Is there any wrapper for mister cores that allows them to work on a PCIe FPGA card? It would be cool to have an N64 inside my PC.

FPGA N64

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