PCE in an FPGA

NICE !

http://www.torlus.com/

Im glad i have a spare DE1

 

Yeah, that's quite impressive. :clap:

 

That man seems to be obsessed with stuffing old machines into FPGAs!

 

That is very, very cool indeed.

 

That's one of the things I plan to get when I get some spare cash (a DE1 or a DE2).

 

Ok - now someone REALLY needs to make a small handheld PC GT clone with some flash memory for the games.

 

So how does it work exactly? You buy some FPGA board and then put the core on it?

And how do you connect a controller =)

 

impressive stuff, that guy knows his work

 

Sure is,
I am very impressed by those FPGA guys, its pretty amazing what can be achieved and I feel humbled that other human beings actually work those things out.

 

It (and even moreso the Mega Drive) is an impressive effort but technically I suspect from the presentation that it's pretty "meh" on the inside, though who knows. While most of these types of projects look good and work, most work in the sense that a typical software emulator works, only (hopefully) with better synchronization simply from the parallelisation. The reason is that the vast majority of digital designers work with behavioral abstraction (more or less translating emulator source code to hardware). They do this rather than architecting systems from primary logical components ("register-transfer" level and below with asynchronous components) and refining the logic to closely match the real system's timing and precisely match it's state using original research. There are many practical reasons why people do it this way, I'm just pointing out that hardware emulators are not necessarily (read: "often not") as accurate or groundbreaking as one'd immediately assume since they're hardware. As of right now only software emulators are really on the cutting edge and ironically the authors are also doing the majority of the hardware reverse engineering.

 

Hey Calpis! It's always interesting to read your input on this kind of matters. Torlus actually wrote quite a detailed process of the development. Here's the translation:
http://translate.google.com/transla...=UTF-8&u=http://heliscar.com/greg/blogpce.txt

 

I find it more impressive to realizie a PCE in FPGA than a MD. Why? It's architecture is much more obscure and untransparent.

 

Which pretty much backs up what Calpis says.

FPGA generally gives you less lag between button presses and what appears on screen, at the expense of being less flexible with what controllers and screens you can use.

The only other difference between them is how you write the emulator software for a general purpose computer or an FPGA.

It's not a magic bullet that allows one to emulate the behaviour more accurately than the other. Software emulators could be written with no lag at all, if they interacted directly with the hardware. It's the abstraction of device drivers (that allow your emulator to work with any graphics/sound card and joystick) and supporting different processor speed and ram that get in the way.

An FPGA is a cheap way of building fixed configuration hardware for writing your emulator, at this point some things become easier and some things become harder.

I imagine the megadrives dual cpu and dma all driving the bus and the demo coders that turned into games developers made a lot of use of side effects.
While the PCE architecture is pretty simple in comparison.

 

so tell me were the PCEs architecure is so pretty simple?

mega drives are cloned into 50 cent epoxy blobs these days, were PCEs are still almost uncloned these days. and that for a good reason.

 

He didn't say the PCE's architecture was simple and I don't see how it relates to the fact that a technology was cloned or not.

There's only one simple reason why the MD was cloned and not the PCE: it was economically more viable.
Considering the larger success of the MD and the number of games available on the platform, the choice the company made cloning the MD over the PCE seemed justified.

 

The PCE got cloned?

I've never seen a pirated PCE ever.

 

Very little info, but some pics here:

http://ultimateconsoledatabase.com/others/pc_boy.htm

Not sure if these play hucards or are just designed to look like the shuttle:

http://nfggames.com/games/pceclones/

 

Thanks Blotter.

I bet those sold in some obscure Asian markets and didn't make to America in anyway.

 

The PCE hardware not being cloned like the MD/Genesis definitely comes down to popularity. Outside Japan the PC-Engine was the least popular system of the 3. There's more of a market for cloned Genesis systems. That's not to say I don't want a cloned PC-Engine to be realized. I actually would love to see a new cloned PC-Engine DUO with built in Arcade Card and SuperGrafx support. But I'd want it to be a perfect clone. No weird glitches or sacrifices in quality.

 

Slightly off topic: But is there a reason no one has designed a CD-ROM interface board for the PC Engine yet? I mean, one which would allow the use of a regular USB CD-ROM? Sounds like it would make for a much cheaper upgrade path for some users, as well as make for easy replacement since such drives are plentiful. Perhaps no one has reversed the CD-ROM Protocol?