Analogue-pocket-utils Alternatives

analogue-pocket-utils reviews and mentions

• FPGAs and the Renaissance of Retro Hardware
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Nov 2023

  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.

• How Does an FPGA Work?
  6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 May 2023

  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.