Hi! any Analogue/FPGA developers here?

muchosandwich

Member
OP
Newcomer
Joined
Dec 30, 2021
Messages
6
Trophies
0
Age
38
XP
56
Country
United States
I've been lurking a long time. But just got my Pocket and looking to do some dev work for it and other FPGAs. Anyone have any good tutorials? I'm familiar with Xilinx but never tried Intel's Cyclone stuff.
 
  • Love
Reactions: kjhota123

FAST6191

Techromancer
Editorial Team
Joined
Nov 21, 2005
Messages
36,798
Trophies
3
XP
28,284
Country
United Kingdom
I am not sure how many you will meet here. Never played with Intel's efforts myself but gun to my head I could probably recreate a 555 timer or something you could reasonably make on a breadboard with logic gates and wires in vhdl and verilog*. Verilog is probably closer to C syntax and while it is a bit clunky it is also probably the easier in/debugging effort where vhdl is about as unforgiving as assembly, or indeed assembly that is also doubling up as hardware design, though equally as potent. Others are moving away from those approaches in favour of others, and while it often gets a bit proprietary for my tastes where the others above are somewhat open it does provide an easier in.

*trying to do something like

in FPGA... no thanks.

It would probably also depend upon your ultimate goal.

FPGA as literal 1:1 give or take power requirements emulator is probably a different approach to ASIC prototyping, which is different again to rapid reaction/redevelopment (think security breach but that is OK as it can all be reprogrammed) hardware based stuff, which is different in some ways again to people wanting FPGAs to act as high performance specific applications (there was a nice presentation at C3 some years ago where people were using random devices with beefy FPGAs to do various brute force things**, might be nice as an intro as well or at least seeing what goes for the learn using an existing*** project).

**not necessarily the ones I was thinking but a good start



and for others not necessarily sure what is going on


***generally my favourite way of learning something. Get something in, build it, tweak it, break it, fix it, expand it... and then maybe go back for the basics.

At one point people would probably have been pointed at the CPLD world and told to play around in that for a few months before making the leap. Today with micros and minicomputers knocking on the door of FPGA (by way of example I shared a video the other day for people using a raspberry pi + fairly basic adapter board to allow it to recreate all the various shiny CPUs+RAM+extras for the amiga which was a 16 bit era/486 era DOS competitor in terms of potency. Even 5 years ago that would be FPGA or you are a billionaire with a passion project making ASICs.) I don't know that I necessarily would, though it is also not the worst thing.
Some particularly sadistic teachers will bore you to death with SPICE for 6 months and then move to FPGAs. I can see its merits (at that point you are guaranteed to know your gates, shift registers, quine mcluskey/karnaugh, timing concerns and all the other fun things) but I don't like it at all.
 

Deleted member 545975

Well-Known Member
Member
Joined
Dec 16, 2020
Messages
102
Trophies
0
Location
x
XP
892
Country
United States
Hello, and welcome to GBAtemp, muchosandwich! I differ from yet having developed a field programable gate array hardware, nor for, other than using general purpose input output pins of a Raspberry Pi model board; I am feeling appealed to, as well as designing application-specific integrated circuits and otherwise circuits boards for recreative purporses. I am feeling content in my chest from visualizing you having a fun time on your path in scopes related to FPGA and otherwise electronic engineering, muchosandwich!
 

Rahkeesh

Well-Known Member
Member
Joined
Apr 3, 2018
Messages
2,178
Trophies
1
Age
42
XP
3,248
Country
United States
No-one is openly developing cores for the Pocket yet. Analogue has not opened anything up and trying to hack them is going to be an insurmountable challenge for an FPGA newbie, let alone people with experience.

The better place to start would be MiSTerFPGA. Fully open source and with a number of tutorials to get you started. You can edit existing cores and maybe contribute a new feature here and there to get your feet wet. Downside of course is you need new hardware, but this is far and away the more developer-friendly platform and likely always will be. If and when Analogue opens things up 95% of your experience should immediately transfer to the Pocket since both platforms are based on variants of the Cyclone V.
 

muchosandwich

Member
OP
Newcomer
Joined
Dec 30, 2021
Messages
6
Trophies
0
Age
38
XP
56
Country
United States
No-one is openly developing cores for the Pocket yet. Analogue has not opened anything up and trying to hack them is going to be an insurmountable challenge for an FPGA newbie, let alone people with experience.

The better place to start would be MiSTerFPGA. Fully open source and with a number of tutorials to get you started. You can edit existing cores and maybe contribute a new feature here and there to get your feet wet. Downside of course is you need new hardware, but this is far and away the more developer-friendly platform and likely always will be. If and when Analogue opens things up 95% of your experience should immediately transfer to the Pocket since both platforms are based on variants of the Cyclone V.
Not a FPGA newbie... just to Intel/Altera stuff. I'll pick up some MiSTer projects though: thanks for the recommendation
 

Site & Scene News

Popular threads in this forum

Hi

General chit-chat
Help Users
  • K3Nv2 @ K3Nv2:
    Oh hi flame
  • S @ salazarcosplay:
    @K3Nv2 what was your ps4 situation
  • S @ salazarcosplay:
    did you always have a ps4 you never updated
  • S @ salazarcosplay:
    or were you able to get new ps4 tracking it \
    as soon as the hack was announced
  • S @ salazarcosplay:
    or did you have to find a used one with the lower firm ware that was not updated
  • K3Nv2 @ K3Nv2:
    I got this ps4 at launch and never updated since 9.0
  • K3Nv2 @ K3Nv2:
    You got a good chance of buying a used one and asking the seller how often they used or even ask for a Pic of fw and telling them not to update
  • RedColoredStars @ RedColoredStars:
    Speaking of PLaystation. I see Evilnat put out a beta for PS3 CFW 4.91.2 on the 22nd.
  • K3Nv2 @ K3Nv2:
    Don't really see the point in updating it tbh
  • BigOnYa @ BigOnYa:
    Yea you right, I thought about updating my PS3 CFW to 4.91, but why really, everything plays fine now. I guess for people that have already updated past 4.9 it would be helpful.
  • K3Nv2 @ K3Nv2:
    Idk if online servers are still active that would be my only thought
    +1
  • BigOnYa @ BigOnYa:
    Thats true, personally I don't play it online at all, in fact, I deleted all wifi details on it once I installed CFW, so it won't connect and auto-update itself
  • BigOnYa @ BigOnYa:
    I play most games that are on both PS3/360 strickly on the 360, but PS3 exclusives are really only games I play on the PS3 (You know me, I'm more of a Xbox junkie)
  • K3Nv2 @ K3Nv2:
    Ps3 really has no titles worth going online
  • BigOnYa @ BigOnYa:
    what is nps?
  • Xdqwerty @ Xdqwerty:
    @K3Nv2, what about GTA v onl... O Yea the PS3 versión got discontinued
  • K3Nv2 @ K3Nv2:
    I feel like the world's cheapest pc build can play gtaV
  • K3Nv2 @ K3Nv2:
    In modern standards
  • Xdqwerty @ Xdqwerty:
    @K3Nv2, then why mine can't?
  • BigOnYa @ BigOnYa:
    @K3Nv2 What is nps you mentioned?
  • K3Nv2 @ K3Nv2:
    Because your pc has a hamster innit
    +3
  • BakerMan @ BakerMan:
    R.I.P. LittleBigPlanet PS3 servers
  • BakerMan @ BakerMan:
    LBP2 still the goat tho
  • K3Nv2 @ K3Nv2:
    That can be played on ps5 iirc
  • BigOnYa @ BigOnYa:
    I'm surprised any PS3 servers are still up, tbh
    BigOnYa @ BigOnYa: I'm surprised any PS3 servers are still up, tbh