analogue-pocket-utils VS Nuked-MD-FPGA

I _technically_ had prior knowledge as a computer architecture class had us stick some premade pieces together to create a CPU we designed, but I personally wrote no Verilog, and it was a small subset of the class.

I don't have much documentation for getting started with HDLs (Verilog, VHDL, etc), but I have tried to document my process as much as possible. I have primarily developed for the Analogue Pocket, so my documentation is themed towards that device, but there's IP (code modules) and wiki entries that would be useful for everyone: https://github.com/agg23/analogue-pocket-utils

I had previously written a cycle accurate NES emulator, so I was familiar with hardware techniques, but not what they look like in circuits. The first core I wrote was a schematic accurate Pong implementation. This was both good and bad because it's very simple and has no CPU (and thus no code), but it also makes it very hard to tell what is going on. I went from there to doing a lot of ports (NES, SNES, PCE, and a few more), and after that I worked on my own cores (Tamagotchi, Game and Watch). Tamagotchi I took a very typical software approach where I wrote massive amounts of unit tests and wrote against those tests. While this is what real hardware developers do, I found it to be a huge waste of time when you're working by yourself on a small project.

I, and a few others, are very willing to help people learn (though I'm still really a noob). If you want to play around in this space, let me know and I'll try to help you with what you need.

Not to draw attention to myself or anything, but if you're interested in learning to make cores for the Analogue Pocket or MiSTer (or similar) platforms, I highly recommend taking a look at the resources and wiki I'm slowly building - https://github.com/agg23/analogue-pocket-utils/

I started ~7 months ago with approximately no FPGA or hardware experience, have now ported ~6 cores from MiSTer to Pocket, and just released my first core of my own, the original Tamagotchi - https://github.com/agg23/fpga-tamagotchi/

If you want to join in, I and several other devs are very willing to help talk you through it. We primarily are on the FPGAming Discord server - https://discord.gg/Gmcmdhzs - which is probably the best place to get a hold of me as well.

The reality is that the vast majority of these FPGA-based clones don't actually perfectly emulate the logic. They're using the same reverse engineering techniques the traditional emulator developers used and sometimes even the same community documentation. The results are often quite good, but they're making a new implementation that matches the observed behavior of the original system to the best of their abilities.

Now there are some exceptions. Nuked MD FPGA[0] is a recent example of an FPGA recreation that is a fairly direct translation of the original logic using silicon die analysis. In this case, the logic is basically identical, but as you guessed the physical layout is different. Generally speaking, you write FPGA "gateware" in a language like Verilog or VHDL. These don't intrinsically have any information about the physical layout of the logic which is handled by the toolchain instead. As wmf says, this is generally not a problem most of the time. For synchronous logic, either the total propagation delay is small enough for a single cycle or it isn't. The toolchain will estimate this delay and report whether you met timing or not for the configured clockspeed.

Not everything you can do in silicon translates well to FPGAs (both clock edges is also generally not well supported for instance), but for the most part these things are easy enough to work around.

[0] https://github.com/nukeykt/Nuked-MD-FPGA

Kinda, sorta? This is like saying "a computer is not enough, you need a binary." What's here is the source code in Verilog. This produces a netlist (set of gates) which is synthesized into an actual bitstream (proprietary gate configuration file) for a specific FPGA hosted on a specific board.

In this case, the project isn't very documented but it looks like fairly generic Verilog without a lot of vendor specific extensions. So, what you need is a Verilog toolchain which can synthesize the source code into a netlist, and then into a bitstream, and the right set of extra code to target an actual physical piece of hardware.

Right now, it looks like the only board support that's checked into the repository is for the Icarus Verilog simulation environment: https://github.com/nukeykt/Nuked-MD-FPGA/tree/main/icarus .

But, the overall setup looks pretty simple and generic, so it should (hopefully) be possible to synthesize to your board of choice by reimplementing run.v and memstubs.v towards an actual hardware configuration.