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.).

[0]https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/

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.

This is really cool at first glance and very HN worthy. I've bookmarked it and will look into it deeper. Recreates roughly my first PC setup though I think I had a Matrox Mystique so that makes it even more interesting. And I've been looking for a "I build something cool with an FPGA" kind of project to look into for a while now.

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.

Tomb Raider (1996) ostensibly required a Pentium, and I remember (though memory may be faulty) the demo refusing to run on my 486. Does this FPGA 486 support the additional Pentium instructions?

It seems that within the past few years, there have been a great increase in the number of articles on low-level GPU internals/programming, which was previously a very niche subject. However, once you understand that a GPU is conceptually a processor specialised for graphics operations, with its own instruction set and RAM, then everything seems quite straightforward, and you can actually start thinking about how to implement one.

The specification is a behavioral target, rather than a circuit diagram.

Did anyone else get a slight feeling of LLM-ism from that sentence? Not a complaint, because I've noticed AI is definitely leading to some great boosts (the somewhat related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49717638 is on the front page as I write this.)

The lack of example videos is killing me!

Am I right that Voodoo had no early depth test and thus triangles are textured even if they are completely obstructed?

I'd run the Virtual Notre Dame VRML demo in this, if I could!

I had that VooDoo card- Quake 1 was amazing on it. Of course today it's not amazing.

Will it support 31kHz video out via VGA I wonder? Would love a period-accurate PC in my superstation one.

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