Hacker News Reader

Comment by radicalbyte | Hacker News Reader

You would easily eventually get into volumes of 2-3 million a year if you could get something out which is powerful enough for PS2 level re-creation.

The MiSTER project is already inspiring a generation to learn how to program FPGAs, those skills could be applied to improve performance in a lot of applications.

View on HN

I'd like to know how many MiSTer owners there are in the world.

Part of me wants to say it's a lot, and part of me wants to say that the retro gaming community is peanuts compared to other FPGA consumers.

I suspect the same. My view is that the MiSTer FPGA crowd is very loud in the subreddits and discord channels of the world, but in reality most people using FPGAs in any significant capacity are much more tight lipped about it.

Yes, but recreating the PS2 is an order of magnitude more complicated than a PS1, which is still a massive undertaking for an individual. Even supposing we had a cheap enough FPGA, who would write the HDL to simulate a PS2?

The ps1 cpu was just a mips. Building a mips cpu with an fpga is a normal required undergrad project for a cs degree or it was a couple decades ago. I was feeling dismissive until I looked at the specs for the gpu and spu... That was some serious work for the ps1. The ps2 had that odd cell processor, or emotion engine whatever you want to call it. Its still basically multiple simplified mips cores but now all the stuff to synchronize them correctly? I'm surprised the ps2 emulators are as close as they are. Doing it all in hdl, and with the upgraded gpu, that is enough work that I wonder if software emulation fidelity wouldn't reach hardware fidelity before the fpga design did.

PS3 was Cell processor.. PS2 Emotion Engine..

Ah! The ps2 was still like 8 cores right?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com