> Looks like this clone brings price back to those good old $100 times.
On the one hand, good improvement.
On the other hand, price and performance parity with a seven year old board containing a twelve year old chip? Oof.
On the one hand, good improvement.
On the other hand, price and performance parity with a seven year old board containing a twelve year old chip? Oof.
i) FPGA on a newer process so it can clock higher. For faster 68k in the Amiga core and pentium 1 equivalent speeds in the x86 core.
ii) Faster ARM chip and better ARM-FPGA fabric, opening up hybrid emulation. Currently the ARM-FPGA layer is a real bottleneck and also the ARM core is a little slow.
iii) More spare IO to allow per-system custom io boards.
iv) Built in IO/memory board so they can fit in a nicely designed case rather than the current eyesore.
As discussed in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Z0l9cLO0jA
I'd hope for replacement with the open standard RISC-V instead, as used in many of the newer FPGA families.
Not only would it require a much larger FPGA, but writing the cores is becoming way more difficult.
I also hesitated with the de-10 nano, but plunged in anyway a few years ago, with the MiSTer sdram expansion and some usb daughter board thingy. Blew my mind! and took me right back to real arcade machines. No lag, dropped frames, or other rubbish we just take for granted these days. All I was missing was a decent control deck, but I held off thinking I'd eventually build a cabinet, one day maybe!