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Comment by agg23 | Hacker News Reader

Not to draw attention to myself or anything, but if you're interested in learning to make cores for the Analogue Pocket or MiSTer (or similar) platforms, I highly recommend taking a look at the resources and wiki I'm slowly building - https://github.com/agg23/analogue-pocket-utils/

I started ~7 months ago with approximately no FPGA or hardware experience, have now ported ~6 cores from MiSTer to Pocket, and just released my first core of my own, the original Tamagotchi - https://github.com/agg23/fpga-tamagotchi/

If you want to join in, I and several other devs are very willing to help talk you through it. We primarily are on the FPGAming Discord server - https://discord.gg/Gmcmdhzs - which is probably the best place to get a hold of me as well.

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This is awesome! Thank you for sharing and documenting this so ardently. I don't have a Pocket yet but look forward to trying this tomagotchi core when I do, and maybe learning more to become a contributor when I have some spare time.

I've always wanted to get more involved in emulation and this seems like a perfect scene to get involved through

I spent an hour looking through the GitHub repo for the Tamagotchi core and disassembler. That you accomplished all this in just seven months is very impressive, for someone like me just starting out learning Verilog on Xilinx FPGA in Vivado.

I’ve managed to make the 4 LEDs on my Digilent Arty board ping-pong back and forth like the power indicator on the Nintendo Switch Joy-Con controllers, debounce the buttons and switches and set up clock division to produce different frequencies from the hardware clock. That’s taken me a handful of days in my spare time.

Which would you recommend is better to get started with: MiSTer or Analogue Pocket (non dev edition)?

The workflow of testing new cores on AP if you don't have Developer Pocket seems kind of nasty.

The workflow is actually the exact same for the dev and retail Pockets. Both have an exposed JTAG port, but for the retail Pocket, you just need to remove the "hump" on the lower back. You want to make sure you get an official USB Blaster (https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Terasic-Technologies/P0...), because they negotiate a lower voltage level with the Pocket (someone blew their JTAG port using a cheap one).

For a beginner, the Pocket is definitely easier. With MiSTer, you're building a bunch of other framework code that isn't your own, and that adds a lot of iteration time. I also think the Pocket APIs are more refined, but also more limited. I've already written some info about this - https://www.reddit.com/r/fpgagaming/comments/1318jsr/tamagot...

This is perfect, thanks. I guess i signed up for a dev kit at some point as I'm an FPGA engineer by trade and got sent a pocket dev kit for free. Was a bit of a bother trying to find a singular resource for this stuff.

Feel free to drop by and ask questions. We love seeing new people build stuff.

Hey thanks for your Pocket cores, man. I really appreciate how fully featured the SNES core feels, even if it doesn't have save state support. You're doing the lord's work!

Thank you. I want to point out that the SNES core is not my own, I just did the port to Pocket. The real praise goes to srg320 (https://github.com/srg320) who has been in Ukraine all this time and is still pumping out updates.

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