FPGA Nintendo 64 gaming is here.

just last week analog announced their brand new 2024 product the analog 3D which is a recreation in Hardware Via fpga of the Nintendo 64 A system that many of us have been waiting for and many have speculated of its feasibility this product aims to be a complete reimagining of the N64 especially as it's been notoriously difficult to emulate with good levels of compatibility and of course analog boasts 100% compatibility with 4K visuals now as a quick primer if you're not familiar with the term fpga or you may have heard of it before but you're not sure what it is simply put fpga takes the entire Hardware spec of a game console in this case the Nintendo 64 complete with all the pieces including the custom chipsets and program it into a single s so effectively recreating the game console itself in Hardware this would also be considered Hardware preservation with an open source fpga spec for a particular console or piece of Hardware then it's possible to recreate it without owning any original pieces pretty neat stuff right now this hardware-based emulation is a very viable alternative when we talk about traditional software-based emulation especially for enthusiasts who expect accuracy and as little as possible latency over everything else however analog isn't the only one who's working on a Nintendo 64 fpga project right now in active development there is a N64 fpga core that's being developed for the Mis project an open- source project that emulates consoles computers and arcade boards now we've covered the Mis before on the channel and if you want to go more in depth on it I'll leave a link to that in the description below however the does have its limitations many believe that the de10 Nano board which Powers the Cyclone 5 fpga chip would not be possible to run the Nintendo 64 when we consider things like the space limitations that it has the rate that the games would run at the memory requirements as well as the floating Point operations that all are required to emulate a Nintendo 64 accurately and the ceiling was thought to be PlayStation 1 and Sega satin Nintendo 64 was all but written off as impossible but inevitably when people cry the word impossible someone is bound to take up the challenge and that person is Robert pip who's been working diligently on a N64 core for the Mis since around April of this year now of course as someone who is very much invested in emulation fpga and all things retro I've been following on the sidelines the progress of this N64 core but over the last month or so there's been some significant updates and I decided that I would take the weekend to turn on the Mis get it all updated and take a look at the N64 core myself and I got to say it is very very impressive especially since it took so little time to develop Robert is an absolute wizard now I should stress and to be very clear as of the making of this episode this core is still under pretty heavy development it's certainly not complete but the main Hardware pieces to make up a Nintendo 64 have all been implemented in some capacity to where many games but not all are fully playable this includes the CPU the memory the reality signal and the reality display co-processors the floating Point Unit the sound the audio the io even Rumble pack and controller pack saves are implemented now I'm not a hardware expert by any means but I do know the Nintendo 64 Hardware enough to know that there are significant challenges when considering attempting to squeeze an entire N64 into a single chip and one of those challenges would undoubtedly be the memory and the memory bandwidth latency the Nintendo 64 contains 4 MB of Rd RAM on board which is on a 9-bit data bus running at 500 MHz with a peak bandwidth of 562.111 Nano to effectively Implement details of the DDR3 access scheme to allow the cord to be as close as possible to the real Rd Ram interface found on the N64 now let's go ahead and take a close look at some games the first thing that stands out for me is that Robert has correctly implemented the three-point filtering that the Nintendo 64 Hardware has now 3point filtering in modern emulation is quite tricky to implement it's certainly possible to do but it does require some processing due to the CPU intensiveness in the same way as something like motion blur each fragment or pixel from a triangle has to do several texture fetches instead of just one now a good example of 3point texture filtering not implemented is if you take a look at the character select screen here on Mario Kart 64 on the Nintendo switch online you can see that these texture edges are clearly visible and this is a well-known side effect now of course there are PC N64 emulators that handle this rendering correctly and I'm happy to report that the N64 core handles this perfectly in fact Robert's core allows options to en able or disable texture filtering anti-aliasing dithering and more and the result can turn a Nintendo 64 game to one that looks more like a PlayStation 1 [Music] title [Music] the Nintendo 64 frame buffer is also used in many games for a variety of different effects the most popular one is rendering the current frame buffer as a texture and this one is fairly common the best example of this is the TV monitor on top of the tunnel in Mario Kart 64 frame buffer emulation also requires some processing power to achieve the effect correctly and once again the Mr N64 core handles frame buffers perfectly at least with the testing that I've done right now as it stands overall compatibility of this core I would say is around 70% as of the making of this episode and keep in mind that the development of this core is very very quick there is a lot of rapid iterations and there are are a lot of updates that are ongoing so by the time this video is done maybe a few weeks from now this video May well be obsolete but I do want to discuss some of the tasks that need to be completed in order for this core to be considered Mainline the first one being tlb support or translation look aside buffer because the Nintendo 64 has a very limited amount of memory it's important for developers to be given tools to manage that memory now the Nintendo 64 CPU can access up to 4 GB of memory addresses but the Nintendo 64 as we know only has 4 megabytes on board however it is possible for the developer to define a memory map of any of these 4 GB of address space but because this memory isn't physical the tlb's job is to convert this virtual addressing into physical address bace this feature is very important and used in quite a few Nintendo 64 titles including Mario Tennis golden eye conquer's Bad Fur Day perfect AR and turac 2 just to name a few this piece once implemented will significantly increase compatibility of games and with the rate of progress being made on this N64 cor it might be implemented quite soon other things that are still yet to be done are LOD support and additional work on rgba correction as well as work on anti-aliasing other things such as cheat codes being able to replicate the transfer pack are also yet to be implemented but I expect these things will probably come after the big work is completed but what we have here is already masterfully implemented the core already supports Rumble if your controller supports it there is controller pack support there's also eom and SRAM saves both pal and ntsc games are supported as well as both the cic and piff chips so overall what we have here is extremely impressive and it's only going to continue to get better over time considering that a year ago from now Nintendo 64 emulation on fpga was considered impossible we have come such a long way and Robert has done an amazing job now I do want to stress that this video is not sponsored or not affiliated in any way with the Mis project or with the fpga core for the Nintendo 64 I just want to kind of stress that that I'm just a big fan of the work that's being done here and I do want to say that Robert does have a patreon where he does give frequent updates to what he's working on and right now obviously the focus is on the N64 core so I suggest if you want to continue to support fpga development then jump on Robert's patreon page and sign up you not only get access to the kind of pre-release uh builds that he's doing he also gives a very important kind of developer diary of the process that he's been taking to get Nintendo 64 up and running and really just goes into so much detail about all the pieces to make up a Nintendo 64 experience on the Mis and I definitely recommend that you take a look at that because he explains it way better than I do and if you want to go deep with this stuff Robert definitely goes deep so check out his patreon I'll leave a link to that in the description below but we are going to leave it here for this episode today this is very exciting times for me because Nintendo 64 all of a sudden is front and center the talking point of all things fpga there is also a third fpga project that's out there the Mars fpga which I have some information about but to be completely honest I'm not really up to speed about where that that is at but all of a sudden fpga seems to be the big Focus right now when it comes to Retro Gaming and I think that is a fantastic thing but we are going to leave it here for today's episode thank you so much for watching if you liked it please don't forget to leave me a thumbs up leave me your thoughts in the comments below and I'll catch you guys in the next episode bye for now [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Modern Vintage Gamer

Views: 368,099

Keywords: terasic de-10 nano, mister how to, fpga, terasic de10, terasic de-10, n64, nintendo 64 core, n64 fpga, analogue 3d, de-10 nano, mvg, modern vintage gamer, the impossible core, nintendo, mister, 64 bits, 3d, analogue, retro gaming, rsp, rdp

Id: kaaATngW8iY

Length: 11min 18sec (678 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 23 2023