One Hobbyist Rebuilt 3dfx Voodoo Graphics Inside an FPGA
Recreating Voodoo Graphics and a Late-1990s Gaming PC on an FPGA
After a month of work on his z486 MiSTer core, nand2mario built zSST, a SystemVerilog implementation of the 3dfx Voodoo Graphics (SST-1) chip. Combined with his z486 CPU on a Xilinx KV260 board, it forms z486 XL: a DOS PC with Voodoo graphics running at 100 MHz. Tomb Raider now runs with its original 3dfx renderer, and the hardest part was feeding the pixel pipeline from memory.
I ended up spending more time designing, tuning, and debugging the memory system than the arithmetic pipeline.
- monster_truck
I mowed lawns for two summers to save up for a Voodoo 3000 PCI, still didn't even have half of what I needed. Parents covered the rest. Basically nothing I had hoped to be able to play worked. Spent an entire summer just trying to get Arcanum to even run, never did succeed. Learned a whole lot.
Goddamn if that buyer's remorse didn't scar me for life, the amount of researching I did before any purchase from then on was obsessive. I still think of the card fondly for what it represented to 10 year old me. This story does have a happy ending, we ended up getting a Dell XPS not long after with a Pentium 3 & a GeForce 2, back when they were still beige.
- jumploops
In case it's helpful to anyone, MiSTer is a project[0] that recreates classic computers and video game consoles on hardware.
What do I mean by hardware?
Rather than emulating the device in software, which can cause various issues (especially related to timing), by mapping the actual device logic to a field programmable gate array (FPGA), you can achieve an "exact" replica of the hardware.
It's a super cool project, and I highly recommend checking it out if you have an interest in old machines (Apple II, Commodore 64, etc.).
- shoobiedoo
So bummed out that I wrecked the HDMI out on my MiSTer. I was trying to figure out a new monitor layout and unplugged/plugged it in a few times. I could SSH into it no problem, but no HDMI out. After peeking around on the forums, turns out that the MiSTer doesn't take kindly to that while it's still on-- I forget the technical reason. Oh well. Many, many hours of fun playing games with my son on the it, I got my money's worth.