Post #2247412
2026-05-06 12:44 UTC
Replies (5)
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@jamesholden@mas.to 2026-05-06 12:49
@lumecolca@kolektiva.social I know what you mean. It even feels a bit weirdly extravagant to use a 288MHz CPU on a floppy emulator for a 2MHz machine. I still do through, because floppies suck.
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@Wearwolf@kind.social 2026-05-06 13:03
@lumecolca@kolektiva.social I think it's natural to be interested in original hardware. There's a sense of authenticity and realism there. Either its what you used to use or what other people used to use But FPGAs are cool too. It's literally programmable hardware. That's also really cool I think it's just a case of like what you like
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@retrocomputing@mastodon.social 2026-05-06 18:52
@lumecolca@kolektiva.social I've always been fascinated by emulation, and FPGAs for me are the next level. You're reproducing an old system chip by chip, and they all run in parallel within the FPGA like in the original system, something that software emulation can't really achieve. It's amazing the level of research people do for understanding how some obscure chips worked, to recreate them exactly in an FPGA. People like Jotego, just to mention one, are documenting their findings for everyone to see (1/2)
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@retrocomputing@mastodon.social 2026-05-06 19:05
@lumecolca@kolektiva.social Sure, consumer-grade (affordable, that is) FPGAs have some constraints that limit what you can (re)create with them. But that's perfectly fine with me, as I don't see the need to reproduce modern systems that are still available. Many details of emulation via FPGA (cycle-level accuracy, parallel execution, low latency, and more) are unique to this kind of emulation, and deserve to be tried - especially considering the relatively modest price of recent Mister clones. (2/2)
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@gmc@friends.chasmcity.net 2026-05-07 20:28
@lumecolca@kolektiva.social Interesting question. I have zero interest in FPGA based recreations of classic systems. I'm not against them, they serve a purpose, but I'm just not interested. I do like to play with FPGAs though. It's a lot of fun implementing simple CPUs from scratch. But if an FPGA based system breaks, then that's it. You'll have to replace the entire FPGA, which often means you just throw away the whole system snd replace it as a whole. Repairability definitely suffers. Troubleshooting old hardware is much more fun.