Dreamcast Crack

[Ailene Goldhirsh]

Thisdefinitely isn't gonna run on the DE10 nano, but it's great to see someone make a start on a future implementation. I wouldn't expect to see any real tangible results for a good 3-5 years at least though, assuming that Ash can stick it out that long.

Still, exciting to see a glimpse of the future of FPGA console cores nonetheless. And work on the SH4/SH3 would also mean that we could also eventually see the Cave CV-1000 get the FPGA core treatment too! (Speaking of which, since the CV-1000's "GPU" is actually an FPGA solution itself, I wonder if that FPGA code could just be made to run "natively" on a Cyclone V. or similar modern FPGA chip...)

Let's assume you managed to fit everything on the logic side, there is an absolute insurmountable limitation, and that's the clock speed of the FPGA chip, which cannot exceed 100MHz (doesn't even reach that for some). Unfortunately, there is absolutely nothing that can be done to go around this. Maybe an hybrid Dreamcast emulator with some stuff running on the FPGA and the CPU running on the arm CPU could be imaginable. However, the Minimig hybrid venture has encountered obstacles and hit a roadblock, so I wouldn't count on that either.

Always fun to talk about stuff like this, because 3 years ago PSX, Saturn, N64 were all deemed impossible on the Mister, but for the Dreamcast it's just an easy "NOT A CHANCE", unless AI verilog coding gets so good, someone is able to write some magical stuff with AI help.

Highly FPGA optimized soft CPUs (e.g. NIOS2 from Altera themselves) run up to about 170Mhz on the DE10-Nano. That is the absolute maximum you can expect.

Given that other original CPUs are not highly optimized for FPGAs, you can expect lower clock rate.

On newer FPGA architectures this is not a big issue anymore.

Xilinx Ultrascale+ can run their highly optimized 32bit CPU (microblaze) above 400Mhz, so 200-250mhz for CPUs we want should be possible.

I think all these ps2/DC/gamecube consoles - the emulation is so well done on them, fpga isnt such an issue for them, sure would be nice, Redream does a fantastic job, or of course a new GDEMU with an original dreamcast and a vga cable still looks fantastic.

PS2 emulation is still not perfect after all these years, which is kind of crazy to think about. In a way, FPGA would surely be faster than the 15+ years it took for the PS2 to have good but still imperfect emulation. Xbox emulation is still pretty bad, so the only one that is really good is Dolphin, in my opinion. I can't imagine the amount of work to make an FPGA version of the EE or the NV2A. I guess it will happen at some point for arcade boards of this generation and also just for preservation's sake. Patreon support for these 5+ years projects will definitely make it viable, I'm sure.

Really cool. I can't wait to see the progress on this and also what kind of FPGA device will end up replacing the de10-nano in the next couple years. I definitely think Dreamcast is possible without any major hybrid emulation (there is some for the CD-based consoles on the MiSTer, but it's only related to the CD drive) on a newer FPGA device.

I also don't understand why some people keep repeating that emulation is so good already, whenever there is a thread about PC, Dreamcast, PS2 etc. SNES emulation is certainly in a much better state than Dreamcast/PS2/GC emulation. You can just watch the video in the first post and see the glitches in Redream. It's also irrelevant to the topic.

The dev said 5 years, so it's much longer than you think. And this is just a Dreamcast, the PS2 is hugely more complex. Someone would have to code the MIPS III Emotion Engine into FPGA, and that ain't going to be easy. And the higher you go above PS2, the more complex it's going to get, with even longer wait times. 10 years from now, you might have a Dreamcast core, maybe a PS2 core, but you won't/never see a PS3 core, Xbox 360 core.

Emulation, by then, would be a superior option. Offering 4k - 8k resolutions, patches for 30fps to 60fps (as already seen in RPCS3), high-res texture packs, overclocking features, etc.. I wouldn't want a PS3 core, when RPCS3, by the time we get to capable FPGA hardware, would be the superior option.

What the fck are you on about ?

I quoted what the dev who is working on this said, I never said 5 years. GET A GRIP. The dev himself said it would take 1 man at least 5 years, then you clown on about Chad and Karen something...... What the fck does than even mean ? Clown.

I'm not a hardware expert but it was advertised and always known to be a 128bit system..it could be a combination of "bits" calculation for marketing reasons,the same way NEOGEO was advertised as 24Bit or PC ENGINE which was advertised as 16BIt while it had a 8 BIT CPU and a 16 BIT GPU if I'm not mistaken..

Dreamcast's Hitachi SH4 CPU is 32Bit,but has 128BIT floating point.

The main CPU is a two-way 360 MIPS superscalar Hitachi SH-4 32-bit RISC clocked at 200MHz with an 8 kB instruction cache and 16 kB data cache and a 128-bit graphics-oriented floating-point unit delivering 1.4 GFLOPS.

The Dreamcast can output approximately 16.77 million colors simultaneously and displays interlaced or progressive scan video at 640 480 video resolution.

Its 67 MHz Yamaha AICA sound processo with a 32-bit ARM7 RISC CPU core, can generate 64 voices with PCM or ADPCM.

I don't see a problem with it. It's FPGA / Console discussion. It probably won't apply to the current iteration of the DE10 based MiSTer, but it's still ok to talk about similar technologies I would think. It's just one thread, and it's in the "Other" sub.

i was excited to get some CD-Rs today to burn some rare/obscure dreamcast games onto, so i tried the infamous Spirit of Speed 1937 and it would always stop around sector 80400 or so and give me an error, i also notice the "buffer" bar starts to go down slowly before this happens, why is this happening?

You probably got the Verbatim Life Series CD-R in a brick and mortar store? Those are CMC's. You'll want the DataLife Plus Series, also labeled as AZO, which you generally mostly only find in online store like Amazon.com.

well i'd hope so, i dont think i've ever had disc drive problems before. Also a different program reacted similarly to another disc from the same batch, still didnt think it worked properly when i put it into the dreamcast, but perhaps the varied results in each disc means something

okay so heres my log, these are datalifeplus discs.

first was test mode which failed

and then without it

it seemed to work just fine! sometimes buffer went to 0 but then it synchronized apparently and worked fine again! verify confirmed it had no errors so (sadly my console is away and in need of repair) but i'd say this has got to be a success!

There are other benefits to switching to AZO/DataLife Plus away from CMC. Even if you get CMC's to work in your drive and they burn, verify, and play okay, they will most likely become unreadable far sooner than the AZO/DataLife Plus ones. So, one of the benefits of the more expensive quality media is that they will generally last longer. I've only ever had 1 MKM DVD+R DL from Verbatim die on me after it successfully burned, verified, and played.

I am a bit late... but I see that game you want (i.e. "Spirit of Speed 1937") on Archive site and you can try using Padus DiscJuggler software if you want as while I nearly exclusively use ImgBurn in general, Padus DiscJuggler is the official software for ".CDI" files which CDI files are what you need for using on real Dreamcast hardware.

I was looking into this stuff a moment ago and found the last released version of Padus DiscJuggler (i.e. ) on my Linux setup and it seems okay. just in some brief testing I burned a game to CD-RW just to see what my Dreamcast would do and it does not even see the CD-RW disc.

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