Category Archives: FPGA

FPGA Emulates a PDP-1, Breathes New Life Into Classic Video Game

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If you’ve ever wanted to sit at the console of the machine that started the revolution in interactive computing, your options are extremely limited. Of the 53 PDP-1 machines that Digital Equipment Corporation made, only three are known to still exist, and just one machine is still in working order at the Computer History Museum. So a rousing game of Spacewar! on the original hardware is probably not something to put on your bucket list.

But thanks to [Hrvoje], there’s now an FPGA emulation of the PDP-1 that lets you play the granddaddy of all video games without breaking into …read more

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FPGA Emulates a PDP-1, Breathes New Life Into Classic Video Game

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If you’ve ever wanted to sit at the console of the machine that started the revolution in interactive computing, your options are extremely limited. Of the 53 PDP-1 machines that Digital Equipment Corporation made, only three are known to still exist, and just one machine is still in working order at the Computer History Museum. So a rousing game of Spacewar! on the original hardware is probably not something to put on your bucket list.

But thanks to [Hrvoje], there’s now an FPGA emulation of the PDP-1 that lets you play the granddaddy of all video games without breaking into …read more

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A Symbiotic Partnership Between FPGA And 6502

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[Kenneth Wilke] is undertaking a noble quest – to build a homebrew microcomputer, based around the venerable 6502. As a prelude to this, he set out to interface the hallowed CPU to an FPGA, and shared the process involved.

[Kenneth] is using an Arty A7 FPGA development board which is a great fit for purpose, having plenty of I/O pins and being relatively easy to work with for the home tinkerer. This is an important consideration, as many industrial strength FPGAs require software licences to use which can easily stretch into the tens of thousands of dollars.

The 6502 is …read more

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iCEBreaker, The Open Source Development Board for FPGAs

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The Hackaday Superconference is over, which is a shame, but one of the great things about our conference is the people who manage to trek out to Pasadena every year to show us all the cool stuff they’re working on. One of those people was [Piotr Esden-Tempski], founder of 1 Bit Squared, and he brought some goodies that would soon be launched on a few crowdfunding platforms. The coolest of these was the iCEBreaker, an FPGA development kit that makes it easy to learn FPGAs with an Open Source toolchain.

The hardware for the iCEBreaker includes the iCE40UP5K fpga with …read more

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FPGA Hack Becomes An Atari Game Genie

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The Game Genie is a classic of the early 90s video game scene. It’s how you would have beaten the Ninja Turtles game, and it’s why the connector in your NES doesn’t work as it should. They never made a Game Genie for the Atari 2600, though, because by the time the Game Genie was released, the Atari was languishing on the bottom shelves of Toys R Us. Now though, we have FPGAs and development tools. We can build our own. That’s exactly what [Andy] did, and his Game Genie for the 2600 works as well as any commercial product …read more

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FPGA used VHDL for Fractals

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Over on GitHub, [ttsiodras] wanted to learn VHDL. So he started with an algorithm to do Mandelbrot sets and moved it to an FPGA. Because of the speed, he was able to accomplish real-time zooming. You can see a video of the results, below.

The FPGA board is a ZestSC1 that has a relatively old Xilinx Spartan 3 chip onboard. Still, it is plenty powerful enough for a task like this.

The project doesn’t directly drive a display. It does the math, stores the results in the board’s onboard RAM and then sends a frame to the PC using the …read more

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VexRISC-V Exposed

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If you want to use FPGAs, you’ll almost always use an HDL like Verilog or VHDL. These are layers of abstraction just like using, say, a C compiler is to machine language or assembly code. There are other challenges to the throne such as SpinalHDL which have small but enthusiastic followings. [Tom] has a post about how the VexRISC-V CPU leverages SpinalHDL to make an extremely flexible system that is as efficient as plain Verilog. He says the example really shows off why you should be using SpinaHDL.

Like a conventional programming language, it is easy to find niche languages …read more

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Racing the Beam on a Thin Client, in FPGAs

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A few years back, a company by the name of Pano Logic launched a line of FPGA-based thin clients. Sadly, the market didn’t eventuate, and the majority of this stock ended up on eBay, to eventually be snapped up by eager hackers. [Tom] is one of those very hackers, and decided to try some raytracing experiments with the hardware.

[Tom] has one of the earlier Pano Logic clients, with VGA output and a Xilinx Spartan-3E 1600 FPGA under the hood. Due to limited RAM in the FPGA, and wanting to avoid coding a custom DRAM controller for the memory on …read more

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Getting Started with Free ARM Cores on Xilinx

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We reported earlier about Xilinx offering free-to-use ARM Cortex M1 and M3 cores. [Adam Taylor] posted his experiences getting things working and there’s also a video done by [Geek Til It Hertz] based on the material that you can see in the second video, below.

The post covers using the Arty A35T or Arty S50 FPGA boards (based on Artix FPGAs) and the Xilinx Vivado software. Although Vivado will allow you to do conventional FPGA development, it also can work to compose function blocks to produce CPUs and that’s really what’s going on here.

The final design has an M3 …read more

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Packing Decimal Numbers Easily

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While desktop computers have tons of computing power and storage, some small CPUs don’t have a lot of space to store things. What’s more is some CPUs don’t do multiplication and division very well. Same can be said for FPGAs. So suppose we are going to grab a bunch of three-digit decimal numbers from, say, a serial port. We want to store as many as we can, and we don’t want to do a lot of math because we can’t, it is slow, or perhaps it keeps our processor awake longer and we want to sleep to conserve power. We …read more

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