The FPGA emulation space is something I had high hopes for, but, in the end, the desktop Alto, Lilith, Star, Symbolics, Apollos, and TI Micro Explorers I was interested in never materialised (and the keyboards/mice would add to the already substantial price tags).
Emulating the machines you list in an FPGA only really makes sense if you put the microcode in block RAM, until recently the devices at prices most people could afford didn't have enough block RAM to do this.
In the meantime, most input devices have moved to USB which is a lot harder to interface, someone could write a USB stack in Lisp for MIT/LMI machines or for the Xerox systems but it is a big task. The Tang Nano architecture of using a separate conventional CPU for IO seems like cheating to me though I suppose it does match how Symbolics machines worked.
Sipeed's Tang FPGAs are really interesting. I've been eyeing the Tang Mega 138k because of its 10GbE ports, especially considering how reasonable the price is.
It is interesting to see where MiSTer community will be going, the DE-10 Nano board that forms the core of the system is very long on the tooth and also quite expensive for what it is. But for ecosystem as complex as MiSTer shifting platforms is immense task.
Cheap clones of the DE-10 Nano ($99 target) are allegedly on the way along with new boards that make different tradeoffs with the pins. Should be interesting - there’s a lot of life left (PSX/N64/Saturn are all very recently added) imo but the price and availability issues are unfortunate.
The MisTER family was always a bit expensive for the benefit it provides compared to software emulators. It is a tool for extreme fidelity, the kind of which you want when you are driving original hardware, but that’s a need few people have.
IIRC, the platform was built off development/evaluation boards that was primarily targeted towards the education market, anyway, where bells and whistles are a priority.
It looks like the platform here is a low-frills one from a company that isn't Altera, Xilinx, or Lattice. Good! I'm glad there's some competition.
Getting from more than 200 EUR/USD down to less than 50 is a big deal IMHO, but also just the availability of of the Tang boards is so much better. This is at a point where it starts to be fun again for an average hardware enthusiast to play around again with different hardware emulations.
I own both a real Amiga 500 and a MIST box. While pure software emulation might be great by now, it just deals so much more real on hardware (with my old micro switch joysticks).
Does anyone have any good tutorial series on FPGAs using some of these more affordable devices? Like someone showing how to setup a dev environment on linux and showing how to get started putting logic on devices?
Definitely don’t buy a 100+ bucks device if you’re new and just want to figure out if it’s something for you. The difference (especially for hobbyists) isn’t a problem.
Tang nano‘s are quite cheap and really good for beginners. Totally depends on where you live but usually they go for around $10 and even less.
