Nuked-MD-FPGA – accurate Sega Genesis re-implementation based on decapped chips

Re:Nuked-MD-FPGA – accurate Sega Genesis re-implementation b... by joshspankit on Thursday August 03, 2023 @08:35PM (#36993954)

While there is some amount of software emulators “it’s not quite right”-ness, this is more spurred by the general availability of FPGAs with enough resources to “become” older consoles like the Genesis/MegaDrive.

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Re:Nuked-MD-FPGA – accurate Sega Genesis re-implementation b... by jonny_eh on Thursday August 03, 2023 @09:12PM (#36994193)

But there already exist cores for Mister and Analogue Pocket. e.g. https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Genesis_MiSTer

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Re:Nuked-MD-FPGA – accurate Sega Genesis re-implementation b... by JohnBooty on Friday August 04, 2023 @12:00PM (#37001802)

I have never worked under the hood of an emulation project, but my understanding is that the Mister/Analogue cores are best understood as an "FPGA implementation of existing software emulation."

In other words, they are not emulating the 68K, VDP, and other supporting chips on a gate-for-gate basis. They are emulating them at a higher level.

With the decapping of the Genesis' hardware, it should now be possible to truly emulate them at a 1:1 hardware level. This theoretically can lead to far more accurate emulation. I believe this is a lot more FPGA resource-intensive and may exceed what the existing MISTer/Analogue cores can handle, though I'm way out of my depth here.

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