Running Quake on an FPGA (Custom MRISC32 CPU) [video]

• Silice

  10 1,230 9.2 C++

  Silice is an easy-to-learn, powerful hardware description language, that simplifies designing hardware algorithms with parallelism and pipelines.

• mrisc32-gnu-toolchain

  2 - -

• InfluxDB

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• mc1-quake

  1 - -

Turns out that they were a good fit for the kind of rasterization loops that you find in Quake and Doom. E.g. https://gitlab.com/mbitsnbites/mc1-quake/-/blob/feature/port...

They were also really simple to implement in hardware (basically just a small counter that iterates over vector elements while stalling the CPU frontend).

I have not yet scaled up the parallelism internally (by adding more execution units), but I still see performance benefits (less loop logic & branch overhead, less scalar register pressure, less I$ pressure).

• mrisc32-a1

  1 - -

And how do the vectors work with branch prediction? If the CPU speculatively starts executing a vector instruction and it turns out it shouldn't, there should be a mechanism to abort the vector sequencing (or nullify the writebacks while letting the vector sequencing play out).

I don't see that in the overview here, but I guess it's just a low-level detail that isn't drawn:

https://gitlab.com/mrisc32/mrisc32-a1/-/raw/master/mrisc32-a...

• tinygpus

  2 84 4.6 Lua

  TinyGPUs, making graphics hardware for 1990s games

Very, very impressive works, both MRISC32 and FuryGPU (which I just learned about, love the idea of a FPGA-retro-GPU that could go in a modern computer!). It's hard to overstate the amount of passion, care and technical expertise that go into such projects.

I'm the author of 'q5k' (Quake viewer in 5K LUTs) and so I wanted to say Hi to my fellow Quake-on-FPGA enthusiasts. Thanks for the mention, and looking forward to the next steps of your projects!

PS: Q5k is of course much, much slower (runs on a small $10 ice40 up5k FPGA), and only a viewer. The renderer is custom using fixed-point only. Unlikely I'll be ever able to run the full game at any decent speed, but I'm surely going to try :) For anyone interested, here's the repo of q5k and doomchip-onice: https://github.com/sylefeb/tinygpus

• SaaSHub

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